Job Description
Role Overview
We are seeking a Senior Staff Engineer to lead complex initiatives across several related engineering teams. As a hands-on individual contributor, you will own technical direction for a major platform or business domain and turn business priorities into delivery plans. You will partner with Principal Engineers and engineering leadership to align this work with the broader technical strategy.
Key Responsibilities
• Domain Architecture: Lead modernization across related systems, defining scalable architecture, secure integration patterns, and practical migration plans.
• Technical Delivery: Turn ambiguous problems into delivery plans, coordinate team dependencies, and remove blockers from prototyping through production.
• Hands-on Engineering: Build critical components and prototypes, lead design and code reviews, and solve complex problems spanning services or teams.
• Platform Choices: Evaluate SaaS, low-code/no-code, and custom solutions for business value, integration, maintainability, and total cost of ownership.
• Gen AI Adoption: Guide practical Gen AI pilots, assessing output quality, data handling, reliability, and cost before broader adoption.
• Operational Excellence: Improve testing, observability, and reliability across teams. Lead complex incident resolution and address recurring operational issues.
• Business Alignment: Align priorities and trade-offs with business and product leaders. Measure gains in customer outcomes, performance, and delivery speed.
• Mentoring and Standards: Mentor Senior and Staff Engineers across teams, strengthen technical ownership, and promote shared practices, reusable solutions, and technical debt reduction.
Qualifications
• 8+ years of professional software development experience, with demonstrated technical leadership of initiatives spanning multiple teams.
• Hands-on expertise in cloud-native architecture on AWS, Azure, or GCP, including serverless and event-driven systems.
• Experience designing, building, and operating secure, scalable distributed systems and modernizing legacy applications.
• Ability to evaluate SaaS and low-code/no-code platforms, with working knowledge of Gen AI capabilities and limitations.
• Track record of navigating ambiguity, making architectural trade-offs, and delivering measurable business outcomes through cross-team collaboration.
• Strong coding and design skills, with experience improving software quality, reliability, and engineering practices.
• Clear communication with technical and non-technical stakeholders, and experience mentoring senior engineers and influencing without formal authority.
Preferred Qualifications
• Full-stack experience across backend, frontend, cloud, and infrastructure.
• Experience with SQL and NoSQL, messaging such as Kafka or Kinesis, and caching such as Redis or ElastiCache.
• Experience with DevOps practices, CI/CD pipelines, and infrastructure as code.
• Practical experience delivering Gen AI solutions or integrating AI services into business workflows.
• Experience in media, entertainment, digital platforms, or fast-paced modernization environments.
Why Join Versant
• Shape major platforms and engineering practices during Versant's modernization.
• Work on business-critical initiatives with direct visibility to senior leadership.
• Join a culture that values ownership, pragmatic decisions, and continuous learning.
Additional Information
As part of our selection process, external candidates may be required to attend an in-person interview with a VERSANT Media employee at one of our locations prior to a hiring decision.
