Staff Engineer, Communications Platform

Finalsite•Glastonbury, CT

1d•Remote

About The Position

The Staff Engineer, Communications Platform will provide technical leadership for Finalsite’s high-scale communications infrastructure supporting emergency alerts, district notifications, and parent communications. This role will lead platform modernization, reliability improvements, observability initiatives, and long-term architectural strategy across a multi-cloud environment. The Staff Engineer will inherit a mission-critical platform that is functional but fragile — a legacy messaging core operating across a fragmented multi-cloud environment with limited visibility into emerging issues before they impact customers. Initial priorities include strengthening observability, improving operational discipline, and increasing platform reliability. In parallel, the Staff Engineer will lead a modernization initiative that previous efforts were unable to complete. Responsibilities include evaluating existing architectural work, defining the future-state migration strategy, and driving execution through completion while maintaining platform stability and performance. The role will also serve as a key driver of engineering excellence by establishing stronger architecture practices, improving cross-functional coordination, and ensuring technical decisions are made proactively, strategically, and with long-term scalability in mind.

Requirements

At least 12 years of experience as a Staff Engineer or senior-level individual contributor supporting high-scale communications or messaging platforms
Strong background in Kubernetes, cloud infrastructure, and distributed systems operations
Experience leading modernization or migration initiatives for production systems
Proficiency with observability tools, monitoring frameworks, and incident response practices
Experience working with Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) methodologies and cloud-native technologies
Strong Python development and operational experience
Experience using AI-assisted development tools such as Claude Code, Codex, or similar technologies
Strong communication, technical leadership, and cross-functional collaboration skills

Nice To Haves

Experience supporting C/C++ production systems
Familiarity with messaging and notification infrastructure, including email or SMS delivery systems
Experience with AWS-native messaging technologies such as SQS, Lambda, DynamoDB, or KEDA
Prior experience supporting large-scale modernization or migration initiatives
Background supporting EdTech, SaaS, or other highly available customer-facing platforms

Responsibilities

Lead technical strategy, modernization planning, and operational reliability for the communications platform
Define and implement scalable architecture, migration, and infrastructure improvement initiatives
Improve observability through monitoring, alerting, dashboards, SLOs, and incident management practices
Support production operations across Kubernetes, queue-driven systems, and multi-cloud environments
Establish architecture review standards and collaborate with cross-functional engineering teams
Provide technical leadership during incidents, root cause analysis, and operational reviews
Promote Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) and operational best practices across the engineering organization
Utilize AI-assisted development tools to support codebase navigation and platform evolution