Staff Software Engineer

Collectors•Santa Ana, CA

About The Position

Collectors is hiring two Staff Software Engineers for its API and Collectibles Data Team. The team turns Collectors’ collectibles data into products, including external APIs and the specification data that identifies items the company grades, authenticates, and sells. It owns external-facing APIs and the API gateway layer, developer portals, collectibles specification data models and ingestion pipelines, and integrations used by downstream products. Its work supports PSA, Beckett, SGC, Card Ladder, marketplace and research teams, and external partners across millions of collectible specifications and certificates. The Staff Software Engineer will set technical direction for the team and have expertise across its portfolio and how its services and data flows interact, while building working knowledge of adjacent systems across grading, marketplace, vault, and identity. The role owns architecture decisions, API strategy, and quality standards. Near-term initiatives include a certificate lookup API and business admin console, a self-service developer portal, migration of legacy public API users, API gateway consolidation, improved and unified specification data, and a specification API. The position involves leading multi-quarter projects, cross-functional delivery, mentoring engineers, and establishing an AI-first approach to software development. Collectors values onsite collaboration; candidates within a one-hour commute of the office may be expected to work onsite most of the time. Further details are discussed during recruiting.

Requirements

At least 8 years of engineering experience, including technical leadership of multi-engineer, multi-quarter projects.
Track record of designing, shipping, and scaling products with measurable business impact at a high-growth company or scaled consumer platform.
Expert-level backend engineering in Java and Python, including strong Java and Spring Boot proficiency, complex API surfaces, asynchronous patterns, and data consistency in distributed systems.
Experience designing and operating REST APIs at scale; sound judgment on versioning, backward compatibility, authentication, and developer experience.
Deep relational and NoSQL database and data-modeling expertise, including schema design, migrations, query performance, and shared-database coupling between services.
Strong distributed-systems fundamentals, including service boundaries, contract design, Kafka-based event-driven architectures, messaging, idempotency, and failure handling in production.
Production experience with AWS and Kubernetes, plus infrastructure-as-code fluency with CDK and/or Terraform.
Full-stack awareness and sufficient hands-on experience with modern frontend frameworks such as React to design and review across layers.
Track record of raising engineering standards in testing, observability, documentation, and incident response.
Observability-first approach, including instrumentation with Datadog or similar tools, dashboards, alerting, and distributed tracing.
Daily fluency with AI coding assistants and agentic tools, experience integrating them into team workflows, and mature judgment about verification, security, and limitations of AI-generated code.
Familiarity with Agile/Scrum, iterative delivery, sprint planning, and adapting to changing priorities.
Excellent written and verbal communication with technical and business audiences; strong analytical and troubleshooting skills; ability to align stakeholders and make decisions without direct authority.
Strong ownership, accountability, and ability to work in a fast-moving, self-directed environment.

Nice To Haves

Experience with GraphQL or gRPC APIs.
Experience with data ingestion and enrichment pipelines.
Experience with API gateways such as Kong.
Passion for collecting.

Responsibilities

Own the end-to-end architecture of the API and data domain, including services, distributed systems, data stores, and consumers; design clean service boundaries, contracts, data ownership, and migration paths.
Define API standards and strategy for design, versioning, authentication, rate limiting, and documentation.
Lead API initiatives, including a certificate lookup API, a business admin console, a self-service developer portal, legacy public API migrations, and gateway consolidation with consistent rate limiting and bot protection.
Design collectibles data models, pipelines, and access patterns to improve accuracy, consistency, and query performance across product lines.
Lead data initiatives, including measurable specification-data quality scoring, unifying overlapping PSA, Beckett, and SGC databases, and exposing unified data through a specification API.
Establish standards for testing, observability, performance, and incident response, and use operational data to improve stability and latency.
Lead moderate-to-significant projects spanning one to two quarters, coordinating engineers, stakeholders, and dependencies; plan with a value-versus-cost framework and surface blockers and delays early.
Translate business requirements into technical solutions and coordinate across Product, Marketplace, Grading, Vault, Data, and platform teams.
Develop working knowledge of adjacent systems, including CRM, identity, and data/ETL, to identify cross-system risks.
Mentor senior and mid-level engineers through design reviews, pairing, and feedback; foster knowledge sharing and documentation with engineers and business stakeholders.
Set standards and guardrails for AI coding tools, including code review, testing, security, and intellectual-property hygiene; identify useful AI-agent workflows and coach engineers on appropriate use.
Design and review solutions across the stack, including modern frontend layers where appropriate.