Senior/Staff Software Engineer - Tech Lead

OpenMined

6h • $125,000 - $258,000 • Remote

About The Position

OpenMined is hiring a Senior / Staff Software Engineer to provide hands-on technical leadership for its ScreamingFace squad, which builds an open-source toolkit and leaderboard for evaluating fusion models (ensembles). The toolkit is a Python library and engine that uses the URL4 protocol to let researchers compose ensembles and routers across open and closed models, using their own keys, and evaluate them against pinned benchmarks. The leaderboard maps the quality–cost frontier and is backed by a shared cache that makes results inexpensive to verify and reuse.

The role owns the squad’s technical direction while contributing code, making architecture decisions, and setting production-quality engineering standards through example, review, pairing, and guidance. It calls for strengthening the team’s ability to ship and operate production software, mentoring team members, and connecting squad decisions to OpenMined’s broader platform strategy. The position reports to Kevin McDonough, Head of Engineering, and is fully remote for candidates based in the United States within one hour of US Eastern Time.

Requirements

• At least 8 years of professional software engineering experience, including personally building, shipping, and operating production systems at meaningful scale.
• Hands-on experience building production software with AI coding agents such as Claude Code or Cursor, and helping a team manage agentic workflows.
• Strong Python 3.12+ proficiency, including FastAPI services, asynchronous orchestration of concurrent model calls, typed SDK design and packaging, and working familiarity with parsers, ASTs, and DAG execution.
• Distributed systems and API design experience, including designing and evolving interfaces used by multiple independent teams.
• Technical leadership experience introducing engineering quality practices such as code review, testing, and CI/CD to one or more teams.
• Experience mentoring or managing at least two engineers; direct reports are not required.
• Comfort working with ambiguity and resource constraints.
• Commitment, accountability, and ownership, including willingness to ship releases and restore service during outages.
• Async-fluent working style, strong written communication, and ability to build high-trust working relationships across a time-zone spread of six or more hours.
• Cross-functional collaboration and communication skills to improve context-sharing between engineers and non-engineering or non-technical stakeholders.

Nice To Haves

• Practical RAG and information retrieval experience with vector databases, retrieval pipelines, embedding strategies, and aggregation.
• Vue 3 / TypeScript, Rust / Tauri, or cross-platform desktop application experience.
• Networking or peer-to-peer application experience.

Responsibilities

• Own the ScreamingFace squad’s technical architecture end to end, aligning design, engineering, and deployment across the stack and evolving the product roadmap.
• Drive production readiness through deployment monitoring, error handling, graceful degradation, and operational runbooks.
• Establish and demonstrate engineering best practices for modularity, security, reliability, scalability, code quality, and production delivery; mentor the team in these practices.
• Contribute to core technology stack strategy through architectural reviews, identification of shared organizational primitives, and definition of standard interfaces that avoid tight coupling.
• Partner with the product lead to develop and execute realistic roadmaps that balance desired outcomes with feasibility, scalability, and sound architecture.
• Own delivery of engineering quarterly goals and support consistent, high-impact delivery while managing resources effectively.
• Own team output, delivery, and success, including productivity, timeliness, and morale, by matching people and work to interests, learning opportunities, capacity, and capability.
• Improve software delivery with robust tools, processes, and methodologies, and provide hands-on technical leadership through individual development contributions and code reviews.
• Create technical documentation and processes that support high velocity and knowledge transfer.

Benefits

• Medical, dental, and vision insurance with company contributions.
• 403(b) retirement plan, described as the 401(k) equivalent for nonprofits.
• Flexible work hours.
• Fully remote work within the role’s location requirements.
• Flexible paid time off and recognition of local national holidays.
• Opportunity to contribute to an open-source project with broad community impact.
• Mission-driven nonprofit work focused on social impact.
• Collaborative international team that values collaboration and diversity.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed