Staff Software Engineer

We're hiring a Staff Software Engineer to be a technical anchor for one of our product teams — someone who can look at an ambiguous, gnarly problem and turn it into a system other engineers want to build on. This isn't a "senior-plus-more-years" role. You'll set technical direction, make build-vs-buy and architecture calls that outlast any single sprint, and raise the engineering bar for everyone around you — while still writing production code yourself. Our product spans several interdependent teams, so things rarely stay inside a clean box. You'll need to be someone who's energized by that complexity rather than frustrated by it — who notices a gap between two systems (or two teams) before it becomes an incident, and picks it up because it's the right thing to do, not because it landed on your plate. Daily tasks: - Own technical direction for complex, ambiguous problems — translating fuzzy product goals into systems that are simple to reason about and built to last - Design and build APIs and services that are fast, scalable, and a pleasure for other engineers to integrate with - Architect and contribute to event-driven, event-sourced systems (Kafka or similar) that need to hold up under real production load - Design and build frontend UIs, and make sound calls about where logic belongs across the stack - Set the technical bar: lead design reviews, mentor senior engineers, and push back — constructively — when a shortcut will cost more later - Develop and deploy container-based applications, with an eye toward operability, not just "it works on my machine" - Partner cross-functionally with product, SRE, and other engineering teams to make sure your systems are observable, supportable, and someone besides you can debug them at 2am - Actively use AI tools (coding agents, LLM-assisted design, etc.) as part of your own workflow — not as a novelty, but as a real lever for speed and quality 7+ years of engineering experience (Java/Kotlin), including time spent as a technical lead or de facto architect on a team Deep comfort with both OOP and functional paradigms, and the judgment to know when each is the right tool Proven experience architecting and operating container-based, distributed systems in production Genuine fluency with AI-assisted development tools — you've integrated them into how you actually build, debug, and design, not just experimented with them once A restless curiosity — you notice broken or missing things even when nobody assigned them to you, and you go fix them Comfort operating in a system with lots of moving parts and cross-team dependencies, without needing everything to be perfectly scoped before you act A track record of making other engineers better — through code review, design docs, or direct mentorship Must have: Java, AWS, Angular, Spring, PostgreSQL Nice to have: Claude Code, Kafka, IoT, Kotlin