Job Description

SUMMARY: The Staff Engineer is a senior individual contributor who provides technical leadership across Tallo’s engineering teams, helping build and evolve the systems that power a career platform serving early talent. Reporting to an Engineering Manager, this person sets technical direction through hands-on work and influence rather than people management, and partners closely with Product, Data, and fellow engineers to translate strategy into well-architected execution. This is one of the most important individual-contributor roles in the organization.

The Staff Engineer is accountable for the soundness of the technical solutions they lead, the quality of what their teams ship, delivery against the product roadmap, and the technical evolution of the platform, including where and how AI and machine learning create real product value. This is a deeply hands-on role. The person in this seat earns trust through direct engagement with the code and the team, not from the sidelines. This role reports to an Engineering Manager.

ESSENTIAL FUNCTIONS:   Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential duties.

Systems, Process & Engineering Culture

• Help improve core engineering practices — sprint cadence, code review standards, and release process — and set the example through your own work.
• Champion quality, helping define the standards and practices that make sure what Tallo ships works and holds up.
• Partner closely with your Engineering Manager so that technical direction and people and delivery priorities reinforce each other.
• Champion agile, iterative ways of working grounded in a shared understanding of user goals.
• Keep engineering work connected to user outcomes and product goals, not just feature delivery, so teammates understand why they’re building what they build.
• Help balance cross-cutting feature work (auth, notifications, shared components) with maintenance and infrastructure work (tech debt, CI/CD, environment improvements), keeping technical priorities aligned to what feature squads need.
• Help establish strong patterns for mobile native engineering that best serve the product and team.

Architecture & Technical Direction

• Design and evolve technical architecture and standards across the platform, ensuring solutions are secure, performant, scalable, and sound.
• Help prioritize ruthlessly across short-term feature delivery and long-term technical investment, including identifying and addressing technical debt to reduce risk.
• Inform build-versus-buy decisions, vendor evaluations, and long-term platform investments through hands-on technical analysis and recommendations.

Safety, Security & Compliance

• Build safety and security into the platform by design, helping make sure it protects its users and their data.
• Work with Operations and other teams on compliance, given Tallo’s young user base and the regulatory expectations that come with it.
• Support the technology relationship with the parent company (Stride), helping meet its security, compliance, and reporting requirements while keeping Tallo moving.
• Product Partnership & Roadmap Delivery
• Partner with product managers on roadmap priorities, sequencing, and technical feasibility.
• Help ensure teammates have the context to make good tradeoff decisions, including not just what to build, but why it matters and what success looks like.
• Connect engineering effort to Tallo’s company goals of Engagement, Outcomes, and Growth, and to the metrics that track progress against them.
• Identify and clear technical blockers to delivery across teams, including dependencies, requirements, and cross-team coordination.

AI / ML

• Evaluate realistic AI and ML use cases given Tallo’s data, user base, and product goals, including matching, recommendations, career path prediction, skills inference, and content personalization.
• Recommend where Tallo should and should not focus on AI and ML, framed around Engagement, Outcomes, and Growth, and distinguish what can be done in the near term from what requires more mature data infrastructure.

Supervisory Responsibilities: This position has no formal supervisory responsibilities.

MINIMUM REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS: 

• Eight (8) years of related experience
• Strong background in modern cloud-based architectures, DevOps practices, and distributed systems.
• Track record of shipping customer-facing product capabilities, including data-driven or AI-enabled features, into production.
• Experience driving quality, including the standards and practices that keep what a team ships reliable.
• Ownership mindset for technology safety and security, with experience building secure systems and meeting compliance requirements, ideally for sensitive or young user populations.
• Experience partnering with data and data science functions, including data architecture and analytics.
• Strong technical mentorship skills, including coaching engineers, raising the technical bar, and developing others through code review and pairing.
• Strong strategic thinking paired with a hands-on execution orientation. Comfortable working directly in the codebase rather than leading from a distance.
• Outstanding written and verbal communication skills with the ability to influence across engineering, product, and leadership.
• Ability to clear required background checks.

Certificates and Licenses: None required.

WORK ENVIRONMENT:  The work environment characteristics described here are representative of those an employee encounters while performing the essential functions of this job. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions.

• This position is virtual and open to residents of the 50 states, D.C.

The above job is not intended to be an all-inclusive list of duties and standards of the position. Incumbents will follow any other instructions, and perform any other related duties, as assigned by their supervisor.  All employment is “at-will” as governed by the law of the state where the employee works.  It is further understood that the “at-will” nature of employment is one aspect of employment that cannot be changed except in writing and signed by an authorized officer. 

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