Staff Software Engineer, Simulation

Linden Lab•San Francisco, CA

6h•$174,500 - $236,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Linden Lab develops platforms that empower people to create, connect, and thrive through transformative virtual experiences. Since our founding in 1999, we have been at the forefront of the creator economy, building durable platforms that support limitless imagination, self-expression, and human connection. In 2003, we launched Second Life, a vibrant, user-driven virtual world that has grown into a living global community. Hundreds of thousands of people actively spend time there, building relationships, expressing themselves, and creating meaning together. With over two billion user creations and a flourishing $650 million economy, Second Life enables people not only to connect, but for those who choose, to build real livelihoods through their creativity. Unlike traditional social media, Second Life fosters sustained, positive connection between strangers. It offers mobility, agency, and community to people whose real-world circumstances may limit their options, and it creates space for belonging, collaboration, and shared purpose. For many, it is not just a platform, but a place where they can participate fully and authentically. The same principles that shape our communities also guide how we work together. We believe our strength lies in diversity of perspectives, experiences, and ideas. Our values are rooted in organizational health, strengths-based leadership, and the belief that collaborative teams are stronger than individuals. At Linden Lab, your work directly shapes how real people connect, create, and build meaningful lives online. You will be part of a thoughtful, mission-driven team working on technology with real social impact and uncommon longevity. Whether you are building innovative tools or fostering a welcoming community, you will find a place to belong, grow, and do work that matters. We invite you to come as you are. This role requires working onsite in our San Francisco office for full workdays Monday through Thursday. Employees have the flexibility to work remotely or from the office on Fridays as part of their regular five day workweek. Before applying, please consider whether this ongoing schedule and your expected commute are a good long-term fit. We’re looking for a Staff Software Engineer to help shape the technical future of Second Life’s server and simulation systems. You’ll tackle complex, ambiguous challenges, lead cross-cutting technical initiatives, and help ensure the systems behind Second Life remain scalable, reliable, and maintainable. We believe the best Staff Engineers create leverage beyond the code they write. You’ll connect teams and systems, identify architectural risks, bring clarity to ambiguity, and help the organization make better technical decisions. You won’t be joining a team that expects you to simply execute a predetermined plan. We want you to question assumptions, identify opportunities, and help solve problems we haven’t fully defined yet, while mentoring others and raising the engineering bar across Second Life.

Requirements

8+ years of professional software engineering experience, including at least 3 years building or maintaining real-time simulation, game-server, distributed, or similarly complex production systems.
3+ years of production experience with a large, complex C++ codebase, including strong knowledge of memory management, threading, synchronization, and concurrent systems.
Experience designing, evolving, and operating reliable services across multiple codebases and technical domains, including cloud infrastructure, containerized services, asynchronous network programming, and Python or shell scripting.
Proven ability to diagnose and resolve difficult production issues, including crashes, memory corruption, race conditions, and other hard-to-reproduce failures.
Demonstrated Staff-level technical leadership: independently navigating ambiguous problems, making sound engineering decisions, influencing technical direction, and communicating system designs, risks, and tradeoffs clearly across teams.
A collaborative approach to technical leadership, including mentoring engineers, building shared understanding of complicated systems, and raising engineering standards.

Nice To Haves

Experience with interpreters, virtual machines, embedded scripting engines, bytecode runtimes, sandboxed execution, APIs, or long-term serialization formats is highly desirable.
Familiarity with virtual worlds, MMO or game-server architecture, Second Life, LSL, or Lua is a plus.

Responsibilities

Lead technical discovery, design, implementation, and difficult debugging for ambiguous, high-impact changes across large C++ codebases and adjacent systems.
Take ownership of complex technical problems from initial definition through production, turning loosely defined challenges into practical, durable solutions.
Develop a deep understanding of Second Life’s existing systems, engineering practices, and operational context before introducing material changes.
Lead the technical design of initiatives that span multiple systems, codebases, and teams, ensuring solutions work cohesively across the broader ecosystem.
Guide architectural decisions that improve reliability, performance, scalability, maintainability, and the safe evolution of long-lived systems.
Proactively identify systemic issues, architectural gaps, and technical risks, anticipating second-order effects and addressing problems before they become larger operational challenges.
Partner with engineering, product, and other stakeholders to make technical tradeoffs clear, surface risks, and balance near-term delivery with long-term system health.
Raise the technical capabilities of the team through mentorship, design guidance, technical feedback, and by helping other engineers navigate complex or high-risk decisions.