Staff Software Development Engineer
Staff-level engineer defining technical roadmap and building/operating high-throughput Java microservices for OfferUp's business verticals. Owns features end-to-end, mentors engineers, drives experimentation, and champions AI tooling adoption.
About the job
Responsibilities
- Define the multi-quarter technical roadmap for the Business team and align it with company priorities
- Design and operate high-throughput microservices where reliability, latency, and observability are non-negotiable
- Work collaboratively with cross-functional teams to design and implement new features across all five business verticals
- Communicate complex technical designs to both technical and non-technical stakeholders
- Collaborate with engineering teams across OfferUp to surface common pain points, develop solutions, and evangelize best practices
- Drive experimentation strategy, design A/B tests, interpret results, and use data to decide what ships
- Make pragmatic calls on what to refactor, replace, or leave alone, and bring the team along on the reasoning
- Support, mentor, and grow other engineers on the team
- Partner deeply with Product, Design, and Business stakeholders to drive features and assess timelines
- Participate in a reasonable on-call rotation with the rest of the team
- Help maintain code quality across our existing applications
- Create solutions and frameworks that make the rest of the team better and faster
- Champion the use of AI tooling across the team (coding assistants to agentic workflows for testing, code review, and operational tasks); help define guidelines and best practices that scale these tools across OfferUp engineering
- Become an SME for the team's areas of ownership
Requirements
- 8+ years of professional software engineering experience
- Experience building and operating data-driven applications at scale
- Experience performing data analysis and translating results into business recommendations
- Hands-on experience using AI coding tools (Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, or similar) in a production engineering workflow
- Experience using good judgment to balance engineering improvements with business needs
- Experience developing both short- and long-term technical vision for a set of services or features
- Experience guiding and mentoring other engineers
- Strong Java skills (required) and fluency in any other modern language; deep grounding in OOP, microservices, and distributed-systems design
- Hands-on experience designing and building microservices and scalable distributed systems
- Strong knowledge of data structures and object-oriented design
- Hands-on experience with load balancing and handling large traffic volumes
- Experience with AWS or other cloud infrastructure
- A bias toward shipping, learning from production, and iterating quickly
- BS or MS in Computer Science, or equivalent practical experience
Nice-to-Haves
- Full-stack experience with React, TypeScript, and GraphQL
- Experience with payment integrations (Stripe or similar) and third-party platform integrations (Shopify, marketplaces)
- Experience with A/B testing platforms (Statsig, LaunchDarkly, Optimizely) and analytics warehouses (BigQuery, Snowflake)
Skills
Java, Microservices, Distributed Systems, AWS, React, TypeScript, GraphQL, Stripe, BigQuery, Snowflake
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