Staff Software Engineer job description
Staff, IC6 equivalent
We are hiring a Staff Software Engineer to own the technical direction of our core platform. You will set architecture across three product teams, take on the hardest engineering problems, and raise the bar for how 40 engineers design and ship. This is a hands-on role: you will write code, review designs, and be accountable for the reliability targets the business depends on.
Responsibilities
- Own the architecture and roadmap for the core platform, including service boundaries, data model, and API contracts.
- Lead design reviews and set engineering standards that product teams adopt.
- Drive multi-quarter technical initiatives from proposal to rollout, including migrations off legacy systems.
- Lead the response to the highest-severity production incidents, then fix the root causes.
- Mentor senior engineers and grow the next generation of technical leads.
- Partner with product and infrastructure leadership on capacity, cost, and reliability tradeoffs.
Requirements
- 10+ years building and operating distributed systems in production.
- A record of leading technical work across multiple teams without direct authority.
- Deep expertise in one backend language (Go, Java, or Python) and a major cloud platform.
- Experience designing for scale: sharding, caching, queueing, and observability.
- Clear written communication. You can explain a tradeoff to an executive and to a new grad.
- Bachelor's degree in computer science or equivalent practical experience.