Senior Staff Software Engineer

Leads architecture and hands-on development of large-scale, mission-critical distributed systems across multiple teams. The role requires 15+ years of software engineering experience, deep system design expertise, and the ability to influence technical direction while mentoring engineers.

About the job

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 concerning 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-level 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.
Experience building and operating large-scale production systems.
Strong architecture and system design knowledge 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.
Mentorship experience and a track record of raising the technical bar.
Comfort operating in fast-paced, high-ambiguity environments.
Strong communication skills for technical and non-technical audiences.

Nice to Have

Experience in high-growth or product-led technology companies.
Experience building platforms or systems used by multiple internal teams or external customers.
Experience with cloud infrastructure, developer platforms, workflow engines, data platforms, or internal tooling.
Exposure to AI/ML infrastructure, LLM systems, automation platforms, evaluation frameworks, or data-intensive systems.
Experience with reliability engineering, incident management, observability, performance tuning, and operational excellence.
Experience with security, compliance, permissions, auditability, or enterprise-grade systems.
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 remains close to execution.

Skills

Python, Java, Go, C++, Scala, Kotlin, C#, Distributed Systems, APIs, Databases, Data Modeling, Cloud Infrastructure, Observability, Ai/Ml Infrastructure, Llm Systems