Staff Software Engineer

Description

About the Role

We're hiring a Staff Software Engineer to own architecture and design decisions for our platform, including the modernization of legacy enterprise systems into modern, cloud-capable solutions. You'll operate with significant autonomy, act as a force multiplier for the rest of the engineering team, work closely with our Head of R&D as a technical backup, and be a candidate for broader technical responsibility across projects as you prove yourself. This is a hands-on, high-ownership role on a lean, three-person engineering team - small enough that your architectural calls ship and show results in weeks, not after months of committee review. You'll be a player-coach: as comfortable writing code as setting direction, designing and deciding as well as implementing, delegating, and growing the engineers around you. In an AI-assisted development era, we value sound judgment and design thinking as much as implementation speed - you'll have real latitude to use tools like Claude and Cursor to move faster, not just permission to.

Responsibilities

Architecture & Technical Ownership

• Own architecture and design decisions for the systems you're responsible for, favoring pragmatic, right-sized solutions over unnecessary complexity, and weighing trade-offs (build vs. buy, hosted vs. on-premises, integration approach) with senior-level judgment.
• Lead the modernization of legacy systems into maintainable, cloud-capable architectures without disrupting the business relying on them.
• Review requirements and designs early to flag architectural risk, technical debt, and feasibility gaps before they become expensive.
• Own solution-level architecture documentation - decisions, trade-offs, and the reasoning behind them - so the system stays understandable at a glance, not just in your head.

Hands-On Delivery

• Design and implement significant parts of the system yourself - this role ships production code, not just plans.
• Own what you build end-to-end, including its health after it ships - if it breaks in production, you're part of fixing it.
• Apply AI-assisted development tools (e.g., Claude, Cursor) to work faster across design, implementation, and documentation, with informed judgment about where they genuinely help.

Team Leadership & Mentorship

• Delegate work effectively and help pull the wider team forward, rather than carrying everything yourself.
• Mentor other engineers through code review, design discussion, and day-to-day guidance, as an individual contributor rather than a people manager.
• Act as a technical backup to the Head of R&D, and take on broader technical responsibility across projects over time.

Product & Customer Judgment

• Translate ambiguous customer needs - including regulated-industry and enterprise requirements - into sound technical designs.
• Work closely with product owners, QA, and subject-matter experts to understand how the product is used and where the real risk lies.
• Communicate trade-offs, risks, and plans clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Ways of Working

• Operate independently in ambiguous, shifting-priority conditions, setting your own priorities rather than waiting to be told what's next.
• This role has no fixed lane - architecture, hands-on coding, mentoring, production support, whatever's needed. You pick it up rather than waiting for it to be assigned.
• Participate in and help shape Agile ceremonies (stand-ups, sprint planning, retrospectives).

Our Stack

• Frontend: React (TypeScript) single-page applications.
• Backend: polyglot services, primarily .NET and Python, built as event-driven microservices.
• Databases: PostgreSQL, SQL Server, and Oracle.
• Infrastructure: containerized, Kubernetes-based deployments with owned CI/CD pipelines.
• Deployment model: hybrid - both cloud-hosted (SaaS) and on-premises enterprise environments.
• API & identity: API gateway / service mesh patterns and OIDC-based identity providers.
• We're also maintaining and modernizing some longer-standing legacy systems - comfort reading and evolving older architectures is part of the job.

Requirements