Staff Software Engineer, Platform

Sharp Performance

2d•Remote

About The Position

Sharp Performance is hiring a Staff Software Engineer to co-own the architecture and long-term health of its core platform, which supports a 1-1 coaching marketplace. The platform is a Laravel monolith comprising the backend, data model, APIs, background jobs, and internal administration tooling. The role will help scale the platform to support more users and functionality while enabling the teams that depend on it to move quickly. This is a senior individual-contributor role with team-level influence, not a people-management position. The engineer will help set technical direction, contribute substantial production code, and improve how the squad designs, ships, and operates software. Sharp uses AI agents throughout the software development lifecycle, with scoped access, verification, and human approval. The role will help make the platform and its evidence-access guardrails effective for both engineers and agents. Sharp is remote-first, async-friendly, and low on process. The company is a Series A business working with more than 100 public safety agencies and is backed by Andreessen Horowitz and other investors. Its work supports the health, performance, and longevity of public safety professionals.

Requirements

At least 8 years of experience building and operating production backend systems, including recent experience at staff or lead level.
A product mindset, including the ability to question why work is being done, advocate for user needs, and shape the roadmap with product and design.
Deep platform engineering experience owning infrastructure, deployment pipelines, and runtime for a growing product.
A track record of scaling a system through real growth, with the ability to explain what broke, how it was diagnosed, and what was changed.
Strong relational database skills in MySQL or PostgreSQL, including schema design, query tuning, indexing, and migrations on live data.
Hands-on experience with cloud infrastructure, preferably AWS, containers, infrastructure as code, and CI/CD.
Experience with asynchronous and distributed patterns such as queues, workers, webhooks, idempotency, and retries.
Ability to lead through influence, set technical direction, and bring a team along.
Daily hands-on use of AI coding agents, including understanding their strengths and limitations and reviewing and de-risking their output.
Clear written communication, including writing useful design documents and explaining trade-offs to engineers and product managers.

Nice To Haves

PHP and Laravel experience, including Horizon, Nova, or queues; engineers with strong experience in Go, Python, Ruby, Node, Java, or similar technologies are also considered suitable.
Experience breaking up or modernizing a monolith without a big-bang rewrite.
Experience with observability tools such as Sentry or Datadog and with incident response.
Production experience with SOC 2, HIPAA, or other compliance work.
Experience integrating scheduling, calendar, SMS, or email providers at volume.
Experience building agent tooling or harnesses, such as skills, MCP servers, evaluation loops, or guardrails for agents that interact with production systems.

Responsibilities

Co-own the architecture and long-term health of the core Laravel platform, including its database, API, background jobs, and internal admin tooling.
Build platform foundations used by other squads, including stable APIs and contracts, CI/CD, environments, feature flags, observability, and on-call readiness.
Lead scaling work end to end by identifying and addressing bottlenecks in databases, queues, caching, and third-party integrations.
Determine where to retain the monolith and where service, queue, or event boundaries are worthwhile; document decisions and safely deliver migrations.
Make the platform agent-ready through well-bounded modules, fast CI, reliable test environments, and safe, auditable agent access to evidence.
Strengthen reliability and security, including multi-tenant data isolation, access controls, audit trails, and incident response suitable for SOC 2.
Collaborate with C-Squad engineers by reviewing designs and code, mentoring, unblocking teammates, and maintaining coherent squad output.
Work with product and other squads on roadmap trade-offs, particularly when platform work competes with feature work.
Help shape how an AI-native engineering team works at the platform level.