Senior Staff Software Engineer

Responsibilities

• Own broad, ambiguous, and high-impact technical charters across multiple teams or systems.
• Design and build scalable, reliable, and maintainable distributed systems.
• Lead architecture and technical strategy for critical platform, backend, infrastructure, or product engineering initiatives.
• Break down complex technical problems into clear execution plans.
• Partner with Product, Engineering, Infrastructure, Security, Data, and business stakeholders.
• Make technical decisions around scale, reliability, performance, latency, availability, observability, and maintainability.
• Stay hands-on through design reviews, code reviews, debugging, prototyping, and implementation decisions.
• Identify technical risks and drive alignment on durable solutions.
• Mentor Staff, Senior, and mid-level engineers.
• Establish engineering best practices and standards for design, coding, testing, and operations.
• Influence technical direction without formal authority.
• Improve system quality through architecture, operational maturity, incident learnings, and platform thinking.

Requirements

• 15+ years of software engineering experience, preferably in backend, platform, infrastructure, distributed systems, product engineering, or systems engineering.
• Experience operating at Senior Staff, Principal, or Staff+ technical scope.
• Strong coding, debugging, design, and system-building experience.
• Strong programming ability in one or more backend or general-purpose languages, including Python, Java, Go, C++, Scala, Kotlin, or C#.
• Experience building and operating large-scale production systems.
• Deep architecture and system design experience across distributed systems, APIs, databases, data modeling, concurrency, reliability, observability, and performance.
• Ability to own ambiguous, cross-functional, multi-team technical initiatives end-to-end.
• Strong technical judgment and ability to balance speed, quality, scale, reliability, cost, and maintainability.
• Ability to influence senior engineers, product leaders, and cross-functional stakeholders without formal authority.
• Track record of mentoring engineers and raising technical standards.
• Comfort operating in fast-paced, high-ambiguity environments.
• Strong communication skills for explaining complex technical decisions to technical and non-technical audiences.

Nice-to-haves

• Experience in high-growth, hyper-growth, or product-led technology companies.
• Experience building financial products at scale.
• Exposure to payroll domains.
• Experience in SaaS, fintech, HR tech, payroll, benefits, compliance, IT, data platforms, or workflow-heavy domains.
• Ability to operate as a builder-leader who defines direction, aligns stakeholders, and stays close to execution.