Staff Software Engineer, Capacity and Efficiency Engineering

Robinhood • Bellevue, WA

9d • Hybrid

About The Position

Robinhood is building an elite team to apply frontier technologies to the world's biggest financial problems. The Capacity & Efficiency Engineering team operates at the intersection of cloud infrastructure, data engineering, and FinOps, building software to manage, govern, and reduce AWS cloud spend. This role is for a Staff Software Engineer who will serve as the technical lead for the Capacity arm, setting engineering direction, owning complex systems, and improving team processes. The engineer will design platforms for cost attribution, detect spend regressions, forecast demand, and build automation for infrastructure optimization and commitment portfolio management. This role involves working directly with senior leadership and partner organizations to translate cost data into accountability. The position is based in the Bellevue, WA office, with a requirement for in-person attendance at least 3 days per week.

Requirements

• Strong data engineering skills, including distributed data processing (e.g., Spark), workflow orchestration (e.g., Airflow), and analytical data stores serving interactive workloads.
• Strong proficiency with Kubernetes and a deep practical understanding of resource efficiency, capacity planning, and the relationship between infrastructure configuration and cloud spend.
• Experience building automation that safely modifies production infrastructure, with guardrails, progressive rollout, and rollback built in, not just systems that observe and report.
• Ability to reason deeply about cloud cost models, including tradeoffs between reserved vs. on-demand capacity, instance efficiency, and the financial impact of infrastructure decisions at scale.
• Ability to communicate fluently with both engineering and finance audiences, translating infrastructure decisions into financial outcomes and presenting to senior leadership.

Nice To Haves

• Familiarity with cloud billing data and commercial constructs (usage and billing reports, Reserved Instance and Savings Plan amortization, enterprise agreements) is a strong plus.

Responsibilities

• Lead capacity planning and demand forecasting for a latency-sensitive, bursty production environment, ensuring the platform scales to absorb peak demand without sustained over-provisioning.
• Design and build scalable cost attribution and chargeback systems that accurately identify true resource consumers across platform and product teams, enabling fair and transparent cost accountability.
• Architect and own automated anomaly detection and governance tooling that detects cost regressions, routes findings to the correct owning teams, and tracks remediation outcomes end-to-end.
• Partner closely with Data Science to develop and maintain forecasting models, year-over-year cost projections, and unit economics frameworks (e.g., cloud cost per engaged user) that surface future spend risk proactively.
• Drive Robinhood's AWS contracts and pricing strategy by partnering with Amazon on reserved capacity, discount models, and on-demand optimization to ensure cost-effective infrastructure investment.
• Shape how the company measures and governs fast-growing AI/ML infrastructure spend, and apply AI-driven automation to cost operations such as anomaly triage, reporting, and remediation tracking.

Benefits

• Performance-driven compensation with multipliers for outsized impact
• Bonus programs
• Equity ownership
• 401(k) matching
• 100% paid health insurance for employees with 90% coverage for dependents
• Lifestyle wallet — a highly flexible benefits spending account for wellness, learning, and more
• Employer-paid life & disability insurance
• Fertility benefits
• Mental health benefits
• Company holidays
• Paid time off
• Sick time
• Parental leave
• Catered meals
• Events
• Comfortable workspaces

What This Job Offers

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