Staff / Principal Engineer

MFour Mobile Research•Kansas City, MO

13h•$175,000 - $200,000•Onsite

About The Position

MFour is seeking a Staff / Principal Engineer to serve as the senior-most individual contributor on our Engineering team. This is not a team management role — it is the highest-leverage technical seat in the org. You will own the hardest cross-cutting technical problems across DANI and Studio, review critical code paths, and raise the engineering quality bar across every surface we ship. You are the voice on every architecture call that keeps us from making decisions we’ll regret in two years, and you own the areas of the codebase that AI coding tools cannot safely touch.

Requirements

10+ years of software engineering experience with a clear track record of operating as a senior IC — Staff, Principal, or Distinguished Engineer level — in a high-growth SaaS or data platform environment.
Deep, demonstrable command of distributed systems architecture, data pipeline design, and backend platform engineering — with the scars to prove it.
Experience designing and reviewing systems that handle real-time data ingestion, identity resolution, and AI query layers at production scale.
Proven ability to identify the boundaries of AI-assisted development and own the code paths that require irreplaceable human engineering judgment.
Hands-on fluency with cloud infrastructure (AWS or GCP), observability tooling, and CI/CD — enough to own standards, not just consume them.
A demonstrated ability to solve ambiguous, high-stakes technical problems without a playbook — and the intellectual honesty to say when a proposed solution is wrong.
The technical credibility and communication clarity to be the most influential voice in any architecture room — without requiring a title to back it up.

Responsibilities

Resolve the hardest cross-cutting problems across DANI, Studio, and the data pipeline.
Own critical code-path reviews — the final technical check on architecturally weighty decisions.
Define and hold the engineering quality bar across all surfaces.
Write production code where judgment matters most and a wrong call compounds for months.
Set and enforce standards for performance, security, and reliability across all teams.
Be the primary senior IC voice keeping system design, data models, and infrastructure ahead of feature pressure.
Proactively retire technical debt before it threatens availability or velocity.
Lead the highest-severity incidents, own post-mortems, and drive systemic fixes that retire each incident class for good.
Partner with the VPs of Architecture and Engineering to turn roadmap direction into validated, executable plans.
Define where AI coding tools can be trusted and where human judgment is non-negotiable.
Drive tooling, process, and CI/CD adoption that boosts velocity without sacrificing correctness or safety.
Stay current on distributed systems, data platform engineering, and AI-assisted tooling to keep raising the bar.
Set observability standards so the org can detect, diagnose, and resolve incidents faster.
Elevate engineers through code reviews, pairing, and direct feedback — without a management span of control.
Document architectural decisions and standards so knowledge lives in the codebase, not in people's heads.
Be a trusted IC peer to the VPs — the counterweight that keeps management decisions grounded in engineering reality.