SUMMARYThe Staff Engineer, Communications Platform will provide technical leadership for Finalsite's high-scale communications infrastructure supporting emergency alerts, district notifications, and parent communications. This role will lead platform modernization, reliability improvements, observability initiatives, and long-term architectural strategy across a multi-cloud environment.
The Staff Engineer will inherit a mission-critical platform that is functional but fragile - a legacy messaging core operating across a fragmented multi-cloud environment with limited visibility into emerging issues before they impact customers. Initial priorities include strengthening observability, improving operational discipline, and increasing platform reliability.
In parallel, the Staff Engineer will lead a modernization initiative that previous efforts were unable to complete. Responsibilities include evaluating existing architectural work, defining the future-state migration strategy, and driving execution through completion while maintaining platform stability and performance.
The role will also serve as a key driver of engineering excellence by establishing stronger architecture practices, improving cross-functional coordination, and ensuring technical decisions are made proactively, strategically, and with long-term scalability in mind.
LOCATION100% Remote - Anywhere within the US
RESPONSIBILITIES- Lead technical strategy, modernization planning, and operational reliability for the communications platform
- Define and implement scalable architecture, migration, and infrastructure improvement initiatives
- Improve observability through monitoring, alerting, dashboards, SLOs, and incident management practices
- Support production operations across Kubernetes, queue-driven systems, and multi-cloud environments
- Establish architecture review standards and collaborate with cross-functional engineering teams
- Provide technical leadership during incidents, root cause analysis, and operational reviews
- Promote Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) and operational best practices across the engineering organization
- Utilize AI-assisted development tools to support codebase navigation and platform evolution
QUALIFICATIONS AND SKILLSBASIC QUALIFICATIONS
- At least 12 years of experience as a Staff Engineer or senior-level individual contributor supporting high-scale communications or messaging platforms
- Strong background in Kubernetes, cloud infrastructure, and distributed systems operations
- Experience leading modernization or migration initiatives for production systems
- Proficiency with observability tools, monitoring frameworks, and incident response practices
- Experience working with Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) methodologies and cloud-native technologies
- Strong Python development and operational experience
- Experience using AI-assisted development tools such as Claude Code, Codex, or similar technologies
- Strong communication, technical leadership, and cross-functional collaboration skills
PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS
- Experience supporting C/C++ production systems
- Familiarity with messaging and notification infrastructure, including email or SMS delivery systems
- Experience with AWS-native messaging technologies such as SQS, Lambda, DynamoDB, or KEDA
- Prior experience supporting large-scale modernization or migration initiatives
- Background supporting EdTech, SaaS, or other highly available customer-facing platforms
RESIDENCY REQUIREMENTFinalsite offers 100% fully remote employment opportunities, however, these opportunities are limited to permanent residents of the United States. Current residency, as well as continued residency, within the United States is required to obtain (and retain) employment with Finalsite.
