Senior Staff Software Engineer, Recognition Platform
Leads architecture and technical direction for a high-volume recognition platform spanning edge ingestion, real-time decisioning, identity, privacy, and operator systems. Requires 12+ years building distributed production systems and deep expertise in Scala or Java, streaming architectures, and cross-functional technical leadership.
About the job
Responsibilities
- Lead end-to-end architecture across edge ingestion, identity resolution, decisioning, notification, and operator surfaces.
- Drive spec-driven development through RFCs and manage roadmap sequencing.
- Align application, computer vision/machine learning, data, security, and platform engineering teams, including external partner integrations.
- Evolve high-volume edge-to-cloud streaming pipelines for tail latency, intermittent connectivity, backpressure, and out-of-order events.
- Design real-time rules and decisioning layers for watchlist alerting, arrival routing, eligibility, consent gating, frequency capping, and next-best actions.
- Balance deterministic logic with probabilistic signals using explicit thresholds, quantitative recognition-error cost reasoning, and model replay harnesses.
- Architect privacy, identity, and consent models for biometric-regulated environments, including bounded-time opt-out propagation.
- Define SLOs, actionable alerting, runbooks, soak testing, and progressive feature-flag rollouts.
- Elevate technical standards through design reviews, code reviews, mentorship, and AI-assisted engineering workflows.
Requirements
- 12+ years of experience building and operating distributed, data-intensive production systems, including experience as a multi-service platform technical owner.
- Proven cross-functional technical leadership and experience aligning independent engineering teams around shared architecture.
- Expert proficiency in a JVM language such as Java or Scala.
- Fluency in event-driven and service-oriented design, gRPC/protobuf, streaming, and relational data modeling.
- Hands-on experience designing high-throughput ingestion pipelines, including delivery semantics, idempotency, ordering, backpressure, and tail latency.
- Experience building rules, eligibility, or decisioning systems that combine deterministic logic with probabilistic or model-driven signals.
- Strong systems judgment integrating third-party APIs, SDKs, and vendor constraints.
- Excellent written technical communication skills, including writing decisive RFCs.
- Ability to navigate physical-world deployment constraints, hardware conditions, and operational complexity.
- Deep understanding of observability, automated testing, progressive delivery, and AI-assisted engineering tools.
Nice-to-haves
- Computer vision, biometric matching, or sensor-fusion experience, including confidence, thresholds, and drift.
- Experience in privacy- or biometric-regulated domains such as BIPA, CCPA, or GDPR, or with consent-management systems.
- IoT, edge computing, fleet-scale device telemetry, or MQTT-class transport experience.
- Identity resolution or customer data platform expertise.
- Hospitality, retail, or physical-operations software experience, including CRM and PMS integrations.
- Uber-tech-lead, TL-of-TLs, or principal-adjacent experience.
Compensation and benefits
- Base salary: $241,000–$279,500 USD annually.
- Benefits may include healthcare, a 401(k) plan, short- and long-term disability coverage, life insurance, stock options, and bonus plans.
Skills
Scala, Java, TypeScript, React, gRPC, Protocol Buffers, Streaming, MySQL, Postgres, Snowflake, AWS, Git, GitHub, Datadog, Claude Code
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