Staff Software Engineer, Core Architecture

Why we’re looking for you

We are looking for a mission-driven Staff engineer who is passionate about their craft and committed to building incredible products for our customers.

This role is 100% remote and can be based anywhere in the United States or Canada. For San Francisco-based candidates: we have a new HQ in the Presidio for optional in-person collaboration opportunities!

Our Tech Stack

Frontend: [React, Next.js, Vue]

Backend: [Node.js, Mongo]

Typescript everywhere

The Impact You'll Have

We’re seeking a Staff Engineer to join our Core Architecture Team, a small, senior group of engineers responsible for solving the hardest technical problems across the platform.

This is a deeply hands-on role. You will spend a significant portion of your time designing, building, and shipping production code in the most critical parts of our system, while also providing architectural leadership across teams. This is not an ivory-tower architect position — success in this role requires comfort operating directly in complex codebases, debugging real production issues, and owning end-to-end execution of high-risk technical initiatives.

You’ll work on initiatives such as

Safely decomposing our monolithic backend, writing and owning the new systems that replace it

Redesigning distributed authentication and authorization systems, including implementation and rollout

Architecting and building for 100× platform scale, with hands-on ownership of performance, reliability, and cost

Building an AI-powered "Software Factory" — a multi-agent system that takes engineering tasks from ticket to PR, orchestrated via Temporal, Slack, and sandboxed Kubernetes dev environments

Pioneering practical AI-assisted development — dynamic tool curation, multi-channel human-in-the-loop workflows, and "fast-fail" guardrails that know when to hand back to a human

Setting technical direction by doing the work, not just reviewing it

Driving engineering standards, tooling, and fundamentals across teams

Mentoring technical leaders and influencing the engineering direction of the company

What You’ll Do

Hands-On Engineering

Design, implement, and maintain core backend systems that are foundational to the platform

Write production code in high-impact areas, including services, shared libraries, infrastructure, and tooling

Define the security boundary for autonomous agents — user identity propagation, task-scoped tool access via a centralized Tool Shed, and sandboxing to limit blast radius

Lead the execution of technically complex projects end-to-end, from design through rollout and iteration

Debug and resolve hard production problems involving scale, data consistency, performance, and reliability

Architecture & Technical Leadership

Drive architectural decisions through prototypes, code, and real implementations, not just diagrams

Establish patterns and best practices for service boundaries, APIs, data ownership, and distributed systems

Partner with engineering teams to guide major refactors and platform migrations

Make pragmatic technical trade-offs that balance velocity, quality, and long-term maintainability

Execution at Scale

Partner with product, engineering, and platform teams to execute technically complex projects

Make high-leverage architectural decisions under uncertainty, with clear trade-offs

Turn vague problems into clear technical strategies and execution plans

Mentorship & Influence

Raise the technical bar through deep code reviews, design discussions, and hands-on collaboration

Mentor senior engineers and help grow future technical leaders

Influence engineering direction by being a trusted technical partner who ships high-quality systems

What We're Looking For

Must Haves

8+ years of professional software engineering experience at high-growth startups or large scale platforms

Demonstrated experience leading architectural design for large, distributed systems

Experience breaking down monoliths into service-oriented architectures or microservices

Deep expertise in scaling backend systems to handle high throughput and complex operational concerns

Strong understanding of auth systems, security boundary design, and distributed identity

Clear decision-making in ambiguous technical situations

Excellent communicator — able to articulate trade-offs to engineers and cross-functional partners

Nice to Have

Experience with TypeScript, Node.js, AWS, MongoDB, Postgres (our main stack)

Experience building or owning engineering standards and platform foundations

Previous roles as a principal, staff, or distinguished engineer