Staff Software Engineer, Developer Experience

Responsibilities

• Set technical direction for major backend and developer-experience initiatives across Clojure, Go and adjacent systems.
• Turn ambiguous product or platform problems into clear plans, staged decisions and measurable outcomes.
• Design, build and operate distributed services, event pipelines, databases and APIs with strong security and reliability characteristics.
• Lead cross-team delivery, surface risks early and remove technical or organisational blockers without waiting for formal authority.
• Make pragmatic recommendations about retaining, evolving or replacing existing components, including reducing legacy Datomic dependencies.
• Partner with Product, Design, Security and engineering teams to connect technical investment to developer and business outcomes.
• Improve observability, incident readiness, performance and service ownership.
• Improve engineering leverage through automation, AI-assisted workflows and controls that preserve human accountability.
• Mentor senior engineers, raise the quality of design and code reviews and create reusable patterns.
• Stay hands-on through implementation, debugging and paid on-call rotation.
• Communicate decisions and trade-offs clearly in a remote, async-first environment.

Requirements

• 8+ years of software engineering experience, with technical leadership on production systems at scale.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• Deep experience designing, building and operating production backend or platform systems.
• Strong programming ability in at least one production language and the ability to become effective in unfamiliar languages and codebases.
• Experience with distributed systems, event-driven architectures, APIs, relational or distributed databases and cloud-native infrastructure.
• Track record of leading complex initiatives across team or organisational boundaries.
• Strong technical and product judgement, including explaining constraints, alternatives, customer outcomes and business trade-offs.
• Evidence of influencing without authority and improving the effectiveness of experienced engineers.
• Operational mindset covering observability, resilience, incident response and on-call ownership.
• Critical use of AI-assisted engineering tools while retaining ownership of results.
• Clear written and spoken communication suited to a remote, async-first company.

Nice-to-haves

• Production experience with Go, Clojure or both.
• Experience with Spanner, Datomic, Kafka or other distributed data and streaming platforms.
• Experience with build systems, containers, artefact workflows or developer tooling.
• Experience evolving a platform, database or language strategy without disrupting product delivery.
• Experience building security or software supply-chain products.

Compensation & Benefits

• EU compensation: €110,500–€181,500 plus equity.
• United States compensation: $170,350–$275,550 plus equity.
• Freedom and flexibility with remote-first work.
• Quarterly Whaleness Days and an end-of-year Whaleness break.
• Home office setup support.
• 16 weeks of paid parental leave after six months of employment.
• Technology stipend equivalent to $100 USD net per month.
• PTO plan, training stipend, equity, medical benefits, retirement and holidays varying by country.
• Docker swag.
• Sponsorship considered case by case based on business needs.