Staff Software Engineer - Grading Operations

Collectors • Santa Ana, CA

3d • Remote

About The Position

The Grading Operations software engineering team builds and operates the internal software that runs our grading and authentication business. This includes the applications our operations teams use daily, the supporting services and APIs, scheduled and event-driven processes for item lifecycle management, and integrations with other platform systems. As grading operations expand globally, the team faces challenges related to both increasing volume and geographical reach. This role is for an engineer who thrives on complex, ill-defined projects, takes initiative on cross-team initiatives, and contributes to raising the design standards of the team. The position offers a broad scope, encompassing a containerized core application, serverless services, event-driven pipelines, and the daily operational applications. The engineer will be involved in building and shipping their designs, with AI tooling being an integral part of the workflow.

Requirements

• 8+ years of software engineering experience building production applications, with deep experience in backend systems and some hands-on experience delivering frontend work
• 5+ years experience / strong proficiency in C# and .NET
• Routine use of AI tooling as part of how you design and build software, with the judgment to review and take responsibility for what it produces
• A track record of delivering projects where the requirements were unclear at the start and the right design was not obvious
• A history of mentoring strong engineers and visibly improving how a team designs and builds
• Experience designing and building RESTful APIs and service integrations
• Sound judgment about where code belongs, including how to draw module boundaries inside a large application and when a capability warrants its own service, and the ability to explain the calls you got wrong as clearly as the ones you got right
• Experience writing and maintaining automated tests for services running in production
• Strong fundamentals working with relational databases and data modeling (e.g. SQL Server, PostgreSQL)
• Hands-on experience building and operating production services in the cloud, including container orchestration (e.g. Docker, Kubernetes, ECS), serverless compute behind an API gateway, and managed messaging and data stores
• Comfortable working in a modern frontend codebase, with hands-on experience in JavaScript, HTML, CSS, and a component-based framework
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines, Infrastructure as Code (e.g. Terraform, CloudFormation), and monitoring and observability tooling (e.g. CloudWatch, Datadog)
• Design documents clear enough that the decision is obvious by the end of them
• Experience turning complex requirements from Product and Operations partners into clean, extensible systems
• Familiar with Agile/Scrum methodologies

Nice To Haves

• Experience designing asynchronous, event-driven, and distributed systems, including systems that operate across regions
• Experience with any of AWS, Python (including test frameworks such as pytest or unittest), Apache Kafka, DynamoDB, or Vue.js
• Experience partnering closely with Product, and comfort working directly with the operations and business teams who use what you build
• Experience making high-volume workflows faster, in the interface or behind it, where shaving seconds off a repeated task adds up across thousands of items

Responsibilities

• Take on complex, loosely defined projects, including those that span other engineering teams, and own their design from first sketch to production
• Build backend services, APIs, and data models that power the internal applications our grading and authentication teams rely on every day
• Work across a mix of architectures, from a large containerized .NET application to smaller serverless APIs and Python background processing jobs, and help decide which is the right fit for new work
• Design and implement event-driven and asynchronous systems that keep operational data flowing reliably at high volume
• Mentor other engineers on the team through design review, code review, and the way you work through hard problems
• Contribute to frontend application development using JavaScript, TypeScript, and Vue.js to deliver features end to end
• Collaborate with Product, Tech, and Operations teams to translate business requirements into clean technical designs across both backend and frontend systems
• Troubleshoot data, integration, service, and UI issues across a large, long-lived codebase
• Share in an on-call rotation supporting the services the team owns
• Write design documents and technical decision records that other engineers build against

What This Job Offers

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