Staff Engineer

The Company

Marigold is a leading cross-channel marketing platform, with solutions for email, SMS, loyalty, and personalization, helping brands transform their relationships with customers. As the trusted partner behind the world's most recognized brands, including Air New Zealand, Chipotle, Hiscox, KFC, Kraft Heinz, The Atlantic, and more-Marigold delivers relevant brand experiences that cut through the noise and drive real impact. Marigold was born through a merger of industry-leading marketing platforms Cheetah Digital, Sailthru, Selligent, Liveclicker, Emma, and Campaign Monitor, and powers billions of customer interactions annually.

The Role

Staff Engineers float across engineering teams at Sailthru to architect and help execute on the technology roadmap, uplift engineering practices, and solve complex technical challenges. It’s a small group of high performance engineers who can operate effectively deep in the technical space of the product, whilst also operating at a high level talking with stakeholders from product, customer success and other parts of the business.

The role reports into Sailthru’s Principal Engineer but you’ll also work closely with the VP of Engineering in enacting Sailthru’s technical direction and vision. The role is a rare blend of being able to make a high-level impact while staying hands-on with code.

What You’ll Do:

• Identify systemic technical challenges and drive their resolution by shaping the technology backlog.

• Plan, coordinate, and motivate teams to improve engineering practices across the organisation.

• Interface with Engineering Managers and other senior leaders and enable the Staff Engineers to engage on department-level aspects of larger initiatives.

• Looks for innovation opportunities between several teams with a willingness to experiment and to boldly confront problems of large complexity and scope.

• Propose technical implementations which support architectural changes that solve scaling and performance problems.

• Align technical initiatives with Sailthru’s commercial strategy, ensuring an optimal balance between innovation and business priorities.

• Plan improvements and features with a long term multi-year view.

• Incorporate modern industry technologies and patterns into technology strategy.

• Mentor and coach engineers, fostering technical growth across R&D.

• Lead and support delivery teams in making strong technical decisions, ensuring best practices in software development.

• Be part of our on call rotation as a second level escalation point for engineering.

• Interact with customers and other external stakeholders and ensure we can effectively enable teams to address customer needs.

• Ensure that teams are aligned on our longer term visions and goals for engineering.

This role requires both big-picture thinking and hands-on execution, ensuring Sailthru’s technology remains cutting-edge while staying grounded in real-world delivery.

Ideal Qualifications:

We’re looking for top-of-class engineering talent.

• Deep technical expertise, shaping engineering decisions at a domain or system-wide level. You need to be able to dive deep into modern AWS engineering, Kubernetes, capable of working across multiple languages (Java, PHP, Python and more) and not be afraid to dive into the unknown.

• Experience solving complex engineering problems, with a focus on performance, scalability, and maintainability for the long term.

• A tactical mindset, balancing architecture with hands-on implementation and pragmatism required to actually deliver.

• A highly hands-on approach, including writing code, debugging, reviewing PRs, and optimising system performance.

• Proficiency in modern software engineering practices, including security, CI/CD, and cloud-native development.

• A collaborative leadership style, with the ability to influence and inspire engineers across teams.

• Experience working in Agile environments, with a track record of leading technical initiatives.

• Excellent problem-solving and debugging skills, and ability to solve hard problems in a collaborative environment.

• Proven track-record of delivering large and complex initiatives.

• An ability to work autonomously.

If you're enthusiastic about constructing scalable and resilient software solutions, come be a part of our engineering team.

What We Offer:

• Unlimited PTO (we call it Open Time Away) and Birthday leave

• Remote first position or work from our Wellington office if you prefer

• Free team lunch once a week, as well as snacks and beverages (if working from the office)