Staff Software Engineer — Job Description

Overview Provide technical leadership to architect, design, and deliver large-scale systems; own cross-team initiatives, mentor senior engineers, and drive strategic technical direction to meet business goals.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead architecture and design for complex, cross-service systems; evaluate trade-offs and set technical standards.
• Drive major technical initiatives from proposal through implementation, including requirements, timelines, risk mitigation, and stakeholder alignment.
• Mentor and coach senior and mid-level engineers; lead design and code reviews to elevate engineering practices and quality.
• Define and maintain system reliability, scalability, and performance goals (SLOs/SLA); propose and execute improvements.
• Influence product and roadmap decisions by translating technical constraints and opportunities into clear recommendations.
• Establish and promote best practices: observability, testing, CI/CD, security, and operational runbooks.
• Lead incident response for large-scale outages, own postmortems, and ensure corrective actions are implemented.
• Collaborate with architects, product, security, and infra teams to align on long-term platform strategy and technical debt reduction.
• Contribute to hiring, interviewing, and technical evaluation processes; shape team structure and career ladders.
• Advocate for developer experience, automation, and tooling that accelerates delivery across teams.

Qualifications

• 8+ years engineering experience (adjustable per company) with a proven record of delivering complex distributed systems.
• Deep expertise in one or more backend languages and ecosystems (e.g., Go, Java, Scala, Python, TypeScript/Node.js) and system design fundamentals.
• Strong experience with microservices, event-driven architectures, databases (SQL and NoSQL), caching, and messaging systems.
• Hands-on with cloud platforms (AWS/GCP/Azure), containerization (Docker), and orchestration (Kubernetes); familiarity with IaC (Terraform).
• Demonstrated leadership in designing for scalability, reliability, observability, and security at scale.
• Excellent communication, stakeholder management, and cross-functional collaboration skills.
• Experience leading cross-team projects and influencing technical strategy without direct authority.
• Bachelor’s degree in CS or related field or equivalent experience; advanced degree a plus.

Preferred / Nice-to-Have

• Experience in performance optimization, capacity planning, or platform engineering.
• Contributions to open-source projects or published technical writing.
• Familiarity with domain-specific needs (payments, ads, ML infra, security, or realtime systems).

Working Conditions

• Cross-functional and multi-team environment; hybrid or remote work options common.
• On-call leadership for major incidents and occasional travel for planning or critical rollouts.

Performance Metrics

• System reliability (SLO/SLA adherence), incident MTTR, and reduction in recurring outages.
• Delivery impact of cross-team initiatives and strategic projects.
• Architectural quality: scalability, maintainability, and reduction of technical debt.
• Team growth, mentorship effectiveness, and hiring impact.
• Developer productivity improvements and successful rollout of platform capabilities.

Pay: $13,685.84 – $16,935.40 per month

Benefits:

• Employee stock purchase plan
• Life insurance
• Paid volunteer leave
• Vision insurance

Work Location: In person