Top Software Engineer Jobs in Santa Cruz, CA

Provides principal-level technical leadership across engineering teams, shaping architecture, engineering standards, scalable software solutions, and delivery practices. The role combines hands-on software development with design reviews, technical decision-making, mentoring, CI/CD and platform improvements, system reliability, and cross-team collaboration. It also partners with product and design stakeholders and may lead high-impact initiatives. Remote work is available with required quarterly travel to Tampa, Florida.

Owns end-to-end test strategy, designs scalable backend and UI automation frameworks, integrates automated testing into CI/CD pipelines, performs exploratory testing, and advocates for testability and reliability across engineering and product. The role requires strong programming, Kubernetes and distributed-systems knowledge, debugging ability, and cross-functional ownership in a fast-moving startup.

Lead technical direction for a central infrastructure team supporting all product engineering. Design and maintain AWS infrastructure, Terraform modules, CI/CD workflows, observability, security, networking, cost-visibility tooling, and operational platforms. Coordinate multiple initiatives, improve reliability and incident response, establish paved roads adopted by feature teams, guide infrastructure strategy, and coach engineers across the organization.

Lead architectural vision and delivery for complex, scalable SaaS systems. Design cloud-native distributed systems using Docker and Kubernetes, develop foundational abstractions, reduce technical debt, and drive engineering best practices. Partner with Product, Design, and Engineering leadership, mentor senior engineers, and contribute to hiring. Apply deep C# and .NET expertise, performance analysis, debugging, and AI-assisted development, including production LLM integrations.

Leads the technical vision, architecture, and execution of AI performance, framework, benchmarking, and developer-productivity initiatives. Drives cross-team architecture, resolves complex systems trade-offs, mentors technical leaders, and contributes hands-on through prototyping, implementation, reviews, debugging, observability, and automation. Delivers measurable improvements in model onboarding speed, runtime performance, reliability, hardware utilization, and Azure capacity efficiency across models, frameworks, compilers, runtimes, systems, services, and hardware.

Build and optimize distributed Lance dataset operations, high-performance indices, table formats, and data encodings in Rust. Develop integrations with Spark, Hive Metastore, Presto, Trino, Ray, and other data infrastructure systems. Improve internal data processing infrastructure, contribute to open-source communities, and promote Lance through technical conferences. The role requires deep distributed systems expertise and extensive experience with high-performance databases, big data, or AI training systems.

Build and maintain premium mobile features, subscription and in-app purchase flows, paywalls, pricing experiences, and advertising functionality for Life360’s consumer app. Own feature quality, performance, reliability, experimentation, and incident response at 100M+ user scale. Collaborate with product, design, data science, and analytics teams; use AI coding agents extensively; contribute to architecture and code reviews; mentor engineers; and help evolve AI-native engineering practices.

Own end-to-end verification and validation for complex cloud-native software systems. Design comprehensive testing strategies, build scalable backend and frontend automation frameworks, identify coverage gaps, perform root cause analysis, integrate tests into CI/CD pipelines, and improve testing efficiency. Apply AI-assisted tools to testing and debugging, evaluate emerging AI capabilities, mentor engineers, and raise quality standards across teams.

Evaluates AI coding-agent interactions for technical quality, engineering judgment, reasoning, explanations, and user trust. Provides detailed written and recorded feedback, distinguishes response quality levels, and helps define standards for tools such as Codex, Claude Code, and Cursor. This remote contract requires strong TypeScript, JavaScript, or Python experience, familiarity with AI-assisted development workflows, and senior-level engineering judgment.

Evaluate AI coding agents such as Codex, Claude Code, and Cursor for engineering judgment, response quality, reasoning, explanations, and usefulness. Provide clear written and recorded feedback, distinguish quality levels, and help define standards for excellent AI-assisted development interactions. This contract role requires senior-level software engineering experience, strong Python or TypeScript/JavaScript skills, familiarity with modern AI development workflows, and excellent English communication.

Evaluate AI coding-agent interactions for correctness, usefulness, engineering judgment, explanation quality, and user trust. Provide clear, opinionated written feedback, distinguish response-quality levels, and help define standards for tools such as OpenAI Codex, Claude Code, and Cursor. The role requires senior-level software engineering experience, strong TypeScript/JavaScript or Python skills, hands-on AI-assisted development experience, excellent English communication, and the ability to assess code without executing or reviewing every line.

Leads technical direction for large-scale accessibility systems that detect, remediate, and prevent web accessibility issues. Designs, builds, and operates secure, scalable distributed systems; drives technical roadmaps; mentors engineers; partners with Product and Design; and promotes responsible AI-assisted development. The role requires hands-on software engineering across JavaScript/TypeScript, React, Node.js, databases, storage, real-time data, and AI-enabled tooling.

Develop, test, debug, document, and maintain software for the Sea Hawk Eye Emitter Library Development program. Analyze user and system needs, design applications and autonomous services, develop scripts and utilities, resolve software problems, prepare operating instructions, collaborate with subject matter experts, and ensure software standards are met. The role requires knowledge of software development, cybersecurity, databases, scripting languages, Git, and Agile/Scrum practices.

Build and operate full-stack certificate management, security, monitoring, and vulnerability products. Develop TypeScript APIs and React frontends, design MySQL schemas, manage AWS workers and Kubernetes infrastructure, maintain legacy .NET and Python services, integrate partner APIs, improve CI/CD and observability, participate in on-call support, and develop AI-assisted features. The role includes code reviews, testing, incident resolution, technical documentation, and mentoring engineers.

Develop performant, standards-compliant Firefox layout and Asynchronous Pan and Zoom features across multiple platforms. Responsibilities include writing and optimizing multithreaded C, C++, or Rust code; debugging rendering and interaction issues; developing layout, graphics, algorithms, and tools; reviewing code; testing and triaging bugs; and contributing to long-term open-source projects.

Develop and maintain high-performance, standards-compliant Firefox layout and rendering functionality, with a focus on Asynchronous Pan and Zoom. Responsibilities include implementing algorithms and user interaction techniques, debugging and optimizing multithreaded code, reviewing code, testing and triaging bugs, and collaborating on long-term platform development across Android, Windows, Linux, and macOS.

Architects and develops datacenter power and performance-management software, including real-time controllers, dynamic provisioning, power policies, and hardware-software interfaces. Responsibilities span architecture, pre-silicon validation, silicon bring-up, productization, deployment, and production support. The role investigates complex firmware, driver, hardware, and platform issues; develops validation automation; and collaborates with GPU, ASIC, firmware, driver, and datacenter systems teams to optimize performance, power, thermal behavior, reliability, and energy efficiency.

Build and maintain Azure DevOps CI/CD pipelines, manage Octopus Deploy releases, configure Azure infrastructure, and develop C# code. Diagnose performance and production issues across applications, databases, pipelines, and infrastructure. Improve observability through logging, metrics, and alerting; conduct code reviews; troubleshoot complex problems; and collaborate with engineering and product teams to plan and deliver releases.

Design and scale Cohere’s Model Vault backend and inference platform. Lead architecture for authentication, deployments, billing, metering, customer lifecycle, and cloud control-plane services. Build reliable distributed systems with strong guarantees for security, privacy, consistency, isolation, observability, and failure recovery. Drive technically complex initiatives from threat modeling and architecture through implementation, production rollout, operations, and iteration at enterprise scale.

Develop and support software applications, REST and ASP.NET web services, distributed systems, data integrations, and storage solutions. Analyze requirements, optimize performance, resolve application issues, implement security and data protection, and collaborate with product, business, and QA teams. The role includes technical documentation, quality reviews, managing competing priorities, and mentoring less experienced developers.

Design and build scalable, secure, highly available revenue infrastructure for Netflix’s global financial workflows. Responsibilities include distributed data processing, financial data modeling, configurable pipelines, APIs, settlement, reconciliation, invoicing, and revenue partner systems. Collaborate with Product Managers, engineering teams, and Revenue Finance while independently delivering reliable solutions through complex cross-functional projects and test-driven development.

Modernize and develop a large-scale React Native mobile application with reliable offline-first functionality, local data storage, synchronization, BLE device integrations, scalability, and strong performance. The role includes shaping architecture, improving engineering practices, collaborating cross-functionally, mentoring developers, providing technical leadership, and visiting customer farms to understand workflows. Requires extensive mobile development experience and occasional U.S. travel.

Build and maintain full-stack software for startup clients, including backend services, frontend experiences, new features, redesigns, bug fixes, and product improvements. Collaborate daily with product managers, designers, and engineers in a distributed, agile environment. Take ownership across the technology stack, write clean maintainable code, contribute to client missions, and support team growth and knowledge sharing.

Develop, test, deploy, and maintain full-stack enterprise applications in AWS. Build front-end interfaces, backend services, APIs, integrations, and database components; troubleshoot complex technical issues; contribute to architecture and design decisions; support CI/CD and production readiness; conduct code reviews; collaborate across Product, QA, and DevOps; and mentor junior developers.

Design, build, and operate scalable backend services and APIs. Develop integrations, shared data APIs, metrics storage, ETL pipelines, and AI-enabled product features. Diagnose reliability and performance issues, improve developer experience, and advance engineering practices. Collaborate with engineers, clients, and non-technical stakeholders while working effectively in a fast-changing startup environment.