Staff Engineer

The Staff Engineer is a senior technical leader and expert in their field, responsible for driving the design and delivery of large, complex projects with broad impact across products, teams, or platforms. This role applies extensive understanding of advanced development principles, architecture, and operational excellence to guide technical strategy and enable teams to deliver customer-focused outcomes at scale. The Staff Engineer influences cross-team decisions, sets and enforces high standards for quality and reliability, and mentors engineers and leaders to elevate engineering practices across the organization.  

In addition to working in accordance with appropriate conduct and behavioral standards, specific responsibilities of this role include: 

Essential Functions

• Define technical direction and architectural patterns for significant areas of the product or platform, ensuring alignment with business strategy and long-term scalability. 
• Lead large, cross-functional engineering initiatives from concept through delivery, coordinating work across multiple teams and stakeholders. 
• Apply expert-level skills to solve highly complex technical problems, evaluate alternatives, and make pragmatic decisions that balance speed, quality, cost, and risk. 
• Partner closely with product and design leadership to shape roadmaps, validate solutions with customers, and ensure technical investments support customer value. 
• Establish and enforce standards for code quality, testing, performance, security, and operational excellence across teams. 
• Identify systemic issues affecting quality, reliability, or developer productivity and drive long-term improvements in processes, tools, and system design. 
• Act as a mentor and role model for senior and mid-level engineers, providing advice on technical design, career growth, and engineering best practices. 
• Collaborate with management and other leaders to influence team composition, technical staffing, and the sequencing of work to maximize impact and reduce delivery risk. 
• Represent engineering in cross-functional forums, communicating complex technical topics clearly to executives, customers, and non-technical stakeholders. 
• Stay current on industry trends, emerging technologies, and best practices, evaluating their applicability and guiding adoption where appropriate. 
• Carry out additional responsibilities as assigned based on business needs 

Minimum Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field; or equivalent combination of education and experience. 

• Typically 10 years of professional software engineering experience, including significant experience in senior or lead roles. 

• Demonstrated expertise designing and delivering complex, distributed systems or platforms in a production environment. 

• Proven ability to define and drive technical strategy and architecture across multiple teams or product areas. 

• Strong track record of improving engineering practices, quality, and operational reliability at a team or organizational level. 

• Extensive experience mentoring and coaching engineers at different levels, including influencing without direct management authority. 

• Academic education and/or professional certifications and experience demonstrating advanced competency in relevant technologies, with the ability to assess technical directions and technologies teams should adopt. 

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience working closely with senior leadership (e.g., Directors, VPs) to align technical strategy with business objectives. 

• Success leading major modernization, re-platforming, performance, or reliability initiatives that significantly improved business outcomes. 

• Expertise in designing systems for high availability, observability, security, and compliance, particularly in regulated industries. 

• Background in guiding build vs. buy decisions, third-party integrations, and vendor evaluations. 

• Recognized influence as a subject-matter expert through publications, speaking engagements, or leadership in internal/external technical communities.