Staff Software Engineer

Who you are

• 8+ years building and operating high-traffic, customer-facing systems, including technical leadership across multiple teams
• Strong CS fundamentals: object-oriented design, relational database design, and systems reasoning
• Fluency at the system and cloud level: eventing (Kafka, SNS, SQS), workflow orchestration (Temporal, Airflow, DAGs), distributed systems tradeoffs, caching, async pipelines, idempotency, backpressure
• Comfortable moving between layers and stacks; language is a tool, not an identity. Our stack today is PHP/Magento on the backend and React/Next on the frontend, on AWS
• Working knowledge of AWS (Lambda, S3, CloudWatch, SQS, etc.) and clear reasoning about tradeoffs between relational, document, and wide-column stores
• A track record of shipping high-impact, customer-facing features in production at scale
• A track record of setting technical direction: proposals written, architectures adopted, migrations landed, standards others follow
• Strong written and visual communicator; diagrams, design docs, and proposals are how you think out loud
• Influence without authority: has aligned engineers, Product, and leadership across teams on a direction and delivered it
• Has measurably leveled up the engineers around them
• Concise, high-altitude communicator who defaults to options plus recommendation, not exhaustive detail
• Member-first orientation: Customer, Team, and Business, in that order
• Observability and monitoring experience (New Relic, Datadog, or similar) to maintain SLA, Apdex, and error rate
• Growth, e-commerce, subscription, or membership experience is a plus: funnels, experimentation, attribution and pixels, payments and recurring billing

What the job involves

• We are not looking for a programmer or a language specialist. We are looking for an engineer, someone with strong CS fundamentals, great object-oriented design, great relational data modeling, and a systems mindset. Someone who reaches for architecture, patterns, and platforms before reaching for syntax, and who picks the right tool for the job rather than the one they already know
• At Staff, that means leverage. You bring the ideas to the table instead of waiting for them. You set the technical bar and raise the people around you to it. You organize ambiguous problems into a plan and drive them to done. You win people over with clear diagrams, written proposals, and data, not seniority
• Set technical direction for Member Growth's systems. Own the architecture and its evolution across pods, not just your own
• Find the highest-leverage problems and opportunities in the funnel, the platform, and our ways of working, and put them on the roadmap with a proposal
• Write the proposals. Tech designs and RFCs with architecture diagrams, options, tradeoffs, and a clear recommendation. Make hard decisions easy to understand and easy to make
• Make system-level calls on when to introduce eventing (Kafka, SQS), workflow orchestration (Temporal, Airflow, DAGs), caching, async pipelines, or new services, and when not to
• Design for horizontal scale and low, uniform latency under real Thrive traffic patterns
• Decompose existing services into scalable components where it materially helps. Plan the migration path, not just the end state
• Work cross-team and cross-function. Partner with Frontend Core, Backend Core, Data, and other product teams to align on shared systems, boundaries, and contracts. Represent Member Growth in technical decisions that affect us
• Take a fuzzy, multi-team problem, break it into a plan with clear owners, and see it through. Unblock others
• Build consensus with engineers, Product, and leadership. Disagree clearly. Commit fully
• Tie engineering decisions to outcomes. Instrument what you build. Defend what you ship with data
• Test-driven from the start. Quality, reliability, and observability are first-class, not afterthoughts
• Bring Product and Design options and a recommendation, not a single path
• Define what good looks like in design, code, and operations. Mentor, review, challenge, elevate. Grow the next seniors and staff
• Own the SLAs for the surfaces Member Growth runs and the standards that keep them healthy
• Multiply output with AI tooling, for yourself and the team

Benefits

• Comprehensive medical, dental & vision insurance
• Adoption & fertility assistance
• Flexible paid time off
• Competitive salary & equity
• Free Thrive Market membership & 20% discount
• Remote-first culture
• Dog-friendly office