Staff Software Engineer
About The Position
The Staff Software Engineer is a senior technical leader in the Engineering organization, influencing architectural direction across multiple domains and helping ensure the platform scales efficiently and securely for more than 60,000 merchants worldwide. The role leads the design, development, and evolution of large-scale distributed systems and helps shape how machine learning and generative AI technologies are integrated into current and future products. It guides teams toward high-impact technical solutions, mentors senior engineers, and contributes directly to reliable, innovative systems powering the Commerce platform. The role works closely with product managers, designers, engineering leaders, and stakeholders across global teams to translate business requirements into technical solutions and support customer-focused decisions, shared context, and continuous learning. Commerce is remote-first; team members in Austin, Atlanta, and London may use optional collaborative workspaces for gatherings, workshops, and in-person collaboration.
Requirements
- At least 10 years of professional software engineering experience delivering production systems.
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
- 10+ years of professional software development experience, with demonstrated leadership in technical direction and architecture.
- Expertise in back-end development with two or more server-side languages, such as PHP, Go, Scala, Java, Python, or Ruby.
- Proven experience architecting, building, and maintaining large-scale distributed systems.
- Strong understanding of distributed systems concepts, including consensus, consistency, and fault tolerance.
- Experience with cloud platforms such as AWS or GCP, or similar, and microservices architecture.
- Solid experience with SQL, in-memory storage, and other data storage solutions.
- Experience operating and monitoring production services, including familiarity with observability tools such as Sentry, Kibana, or Datadog.
- Solid grasp of software design principles, testing strategies, and modern development practices.
- Strong problem-solving and debugging skills.
- Excellent communication skills and ability to explain design decisions and rationale to technical and non-technical audiences.
- Proven track record of technical leadership and mentorship.
- Ability to navigate ambiguity and drive clarity across complex initiatives.
- Interest in learning, teaching, and promoting engineering excellence.
Nice To Haves
- Experience building product solutions with LLMs and generative AI technologies.
- Familiarity with modern AI infrastructure, such as vector databases, model orchestration tools, inference frameworks, and cloud-native ML workflows.
- Experience with SaaS or multi-tenant platforms operating at significant scale.
Responsibilities
- Lead the design, development, and evolution of scalable, reliable, high-performance distributed systems.
- Drive architectural discussions across multiple platform domains and participate in cross-domain architectural working groups.
- Contribute to defining and executing the long-term technical roadmap.
- Ensure technical decisions support performance, scalability, reliability, security, and maintainability.
- Lead initiatives integrating machine learning and generative AI technologies into existing and future products.
- Evaluate emerging AI infrastructure and development practices, advocating for adoption when they offer clear customer or engineering value.
- Keep up with developments in distributed systems, cloud technologies, and artificial intelligence, and share knowledge across teams.
- Build and maintain high-performance, reliable, and secure software systems.
- Write testable, maintainable code that meets high quality standards and lead by example.
- Participate in and lead in-depth code reviews, advocating for practices that improve software quality and reliability.
- Identify and address performance bottlenecks, scalability challenges, and system reliability issues.
- Build tools and frameworks that enable engineers to deliver value faster and more safely.
- Collaborate with engineers, product managers, designers, and stakeholders across global teams to translate business requirements into technical solutions.
- Provide technical leadership and mentorship to engineers at all levels.
- Promote knowledge sharing, continuous improvement, and mentorship across teams.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
