# Staff Software Engineer, Automations

**Company:** [Plenful](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/plenful)
**Location:** San Francisco, CA, Chicago, IL, Seattle, WA, New York, NY
**Role:** Backend Engineering
**Experience:** 8+ years
**Skills:** SQL, Distributed Systems, Workflow Orchestration, Kubernetes, Serverless, REST APIs, Data Pipelines, Hl7, Edi, X12, Observability, Event-Driven Architecture, Schema Design, Rate Limiting, Webhook Handlers
**Posted:** 2026-03-09

> Leads design and development of automations platform systems, owning core infrastructure, workflow orchestration, external integrations, and data pipelines. Requires 8+ years experience in distributed systems and 3+ years technical leadership, with strong database and CS fundamentals.

## Job Description

## What you'll do

### Core Infrastructure & Workflow Orchestration
- Maintain and evolve our workflow automation system that runs across serverless and containerized environments, processing millions of tasks each month.
- Design scheduling, queuing, rate limiting, and retry logic for reliable and fair resource allocation.
- Build mechanisms for state tracking, error handling, timeouts, and cleanup across distributed tasks.
- Partner with DevOps on observability, structured logging, tracing, and deployment automation.

### External Integrations & Data Pipelines
- Manage integrations with SFTP, email, databases, spreadsheets, and REST APIs, with secure credential and failure recovery handling.
- Build and maintain file processing pipelines that handle millions of files per month.
- Work with healthcare data formats (HL7, X12, EDI) and standard file types (PDF, Excel, CSV, JSON).
- Develop webhook handlers, polling services, and event-driven workflows to ensure data consistency.
- Collaborate with ML/AI teams on data pipelines for model training and inference.

### Technical Leadership
- Lead technical projects and set quality and reliability standards for the backend team.
- Identify and reduce technical debt; plan and execute major system improvements and migrations.
- Mentor engineers through code reviews, design sessions, and pair programming.
- Participate in incident response and postmortems, focusing on long-term reliability.
- Write and review RFCs to document and guide key architectural decisions.

## What we're looking for
- 8+ years of professional software engineering experience.
- Strong background in distributed systems, workflow orchestration, automated systems, and event-driven pipelines at scale.
- Advanced database expertise: SQL, schema design, query tuning, and operations at scale.
- Solid computer science fundamentals (data structures, algorithms, system design).
- Experience building and maintaining large-scale data pipelines.
- 3+ years of technical leadership, guiding projects and mentoring engineers.
- Track record of improving reliability, managing incidents, and reducing technical debt.
- Strong written and verbal communication skills for documentation and cross-team collaboration.
- Experience working closely with DevOps, observability, ML/AI, and UX teams.

## Plenful perks
- **Comprehensive Benefits Package**: Enjoy unlimited PTO, fully covered health insurance (medical, dental, and vision), meal stipend, health & wellness stipend, 401(k) matching, and stock options.
- **Flexible Hybrid/Remote Work Environment**: San Francisco Headquartered (Hybrid), Fully Remote for locations outside of San Francisco.

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