Staff Software Engineer - Core Architecture

Owner.com

1d • Remote

About The Position

Owner is building an AI-native system for local business owners, starting with restaurants, to replace various tools like websites, online ordering, CRM, and POS. The product philosophy is to agentically drive demand, convert it, and assist operators, aiming to provide the feeling of having a dedicated team of operators, engineers, and marketers. The company's vision is to expand beyond restaurants to help tens of millions of local businesses succeed in the digital age. Since 2020, Owner has generated tens of millions in revenue, processed over half a billion dollars in online orders, and helped over 20,000 restaurant owners save nearly $200 million in fees. The team is in the low hundreds and growing, comprising talent from successful SMB software companies. Owner operates as a remote-first, global company with headquarters in San Francisco and a sales hub in Toronto. This Staff Engineer role is 100% remote, open to candidates in the United States or Canada, with optional in-person collaboration opportunities at the San Francisco HQ for local candidates. The Staff Engineer will join the Core Architecture Team, a small, senior group focused on solving the most challenging technical problems across the platform. This is a deeply hands-on role involving significant time in designing, building, and shipping production code in critical system areas, alongside providing architectural leadership across teams. Success requires comfort operating directly in complex codebases, debugging production issues, and owning end-to-end execution of high-risk technical initiatives.

Requirements

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience at high-growth startups or large scale platforms
• Demonstrated experience leading architectural design for large, distributed systems
• Experience breaking down monoliths into service-oriented architectures or microservices
• Deep expertise in scaling backend systems to handle high throughput and complex operational concerns
• Strong understanding of auth systems, security boundary design, and distributed identity
• Clear decision-making in ambiguous technical situations
• Excellent communicator — able to articulate trade-offs to engineers and cross-functional partners

Nice To Haves

• Experience with TypeScript, Node.js, AWS, MongoDB, Postgres (our main stack)
• Experience building or owning engineering standards and platform foundations
• Previous roles as a principal, staff, or distinguished engineer

Responsibilities

• Safely decomposing our monolithic backend, writing and owning the new systems that replace it
• Redesigning distributed authentication and authorization systems, including implementation and rollout
• Architecting and building for 100× platform scale, with hands-on ownership of performance, reliability, and cost
• Building an AI-powered "Software Factory" — a multi-agent system that takes engineering tasks from ticket to PR, orchestrated via Temporal, Slack, and sandboxed Kubernetes dev environments
• Pioneering practical AI-assisted development — dynamic tool curation, multi-channel human-in-the-loop workflows, and "fast-fail" guardrails that know when to hand back to a human
• Setting technical direction by doing the work, not just reviewing it
• Driving engineering standards, tooling, and fundamentals across teams
• Mentoring technical leaders and influencing the engineering direction of the company
• Design, implement, and maintain core backend systems that are foundational to the platform
• Write production code in high-impact areas, including services, shared libraries, infrastructure, and tooling
• Define the security boundary for autonomous agents — user identity propagation, task-scoped tool access via a centralized Tool Shed, and sandboxing to limit blast radius
• Lead the execution of technically complex projects end-to-end, from design through rollout and iteration
• Debug and resolve hard production problems involving scale, data consistency, performance, and reliability
• Drive architectural decisions through prototypes, code, and real implementations, not just diagrams
• Establish patterns and best practices for service boundaries, APIs, data ownership, and distributed systems
• Partner with engineering teams to guide major refactors and platform migrations
• Make pragmatic technical trade-offs that balance velocity, quality, and long-term maintainability
• Partner with product, engineering, and platform teams to execute technically complex projects
• Make high-leverage architectural decisions under uncertainty, with clear trade-offs
• Turn vague problems into clear technical strategies and execution plans
• Raise the technical bar through deep code reviews, design discussions, and hands-on collaboration
• Mentor senior engineers and help grow future technical leaders
• Influence engineering direction by being a trusted technical partner who ships high-quality systems

Benefits

• estimated starting base salary range for this role is $240K-250K depending on level, location and experience
• generous pre-IPO equity package
• comprehensive health coverage
• work from anywhere (remote-first workplace)
• unlimited PTO
• extra fun perks!

What This Job Offers

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