Job Title: Staff Software Engineer

Job Summary:

As a Staff Software Engineer, serves as a technical leader responsible for architecting, building, and operating scalable Ruby on Rails-based applications with a strong focus on quality, reliability, and long-term maintainability.

Shapes technical strategy across application development and site reliability practices, ensuring systems are observable, resilient, cost-efficient, and built to scale. This role requires balancing hands-on engineering with strategic influence, making architectural decisions, modernizing legacy systems, improving CI/CD pipelines, and raising engineering standards across teams.

Operates with a strong "quality-first" mindset, driving test coverage, contract testing, clean code principles, and shift-left testing practices. Champions observability and production excellence, ensuring today's features are built with tomorrow's scale in mind.

Time is split between strategic planning and hands-on execution: writing code, guiding architectural decisions, mentoring engineers, and partnering cross-functionally to translate business needs into durable technical solutions.

This role is ideal for someone who thrives in complex environments, wears multiple hats when needed, and raises the bar for engineering excellence across teams.

Essential Functions:

• Design, develop, and maintain scalable, secure, and well-tested applications using Ruby on Rails and complementary frontend technologies.
• Lead architecture and modernization efforts across monolith and microservice-based systems.
• Drive high standards for clean code, automated testing (unit, integration, contract, BDD), and documentation.
• Own services end-to-end with a DevOps mindset, including CI/CD, monitoring, logging, and production support.
• Improve system reliability through observability, performance tuning, instrumentation, and proactive monitoring.
• Lead root cause analysis and post-incident reviews, driving long-term systemic improvements.
• Define and evolve best practices around microservices, cloud architecture, and service scalability.
• Partner with DevOps and SRE to improve Kubernetes-based deployments and cloud infrastructure practices.
• Contribute to shared tooling, internal libraries, and developer productivity improvements.
• Serve as a technical decision-maker, resolving complex architectural challenges across multiple domains.
• Influence cross-team standards to create consistency and reduce friction across the engineering organization.
• Mentor engineers and elevate the organization's engineering maturity through coaching and example.

Minimum Requirements:

Specific Job Skills:

• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience building and operating production systems.
• 2+ years of hands-on Ruby on Rails experience in complex or large-scale environments.
• Strong expertise in relational databases (SQL), data modeling, and performance optimization.
• Demonstrated experience building and operating microservices architectures.
• Deep experience with CI/CD pipelines, automated testing strategies, and deployment automation.
• Strong commitment to high test coverage and shift-left quality practices.
• Experience with observability tools (monitoring, logging, tracing, alerting) and building highly observable systems.
• Experience operating systems in cloud environments (AWS preferred).
• Experience with containerization and Kubernetes-based deployments preferred.
• Strong understanding of secure coding practices and defensive programming.
• Drive architectural decisions that balance quality, scalability, reliability, cost, and speed.
• Establish and enforce engineering standards across testing, CI/CD, observability, and system design.
• Lead design reviews and guide technical direction across multiple teams.
• Evaluate emerging technologies and recommend improvements to the technical stack.
• Align engineering investments with business priorities and long-term product strategy.
• Raise the overall engineering bar through principled decision-making and consistency.
• Mentor Senior engineers in architecture, testing discipline, and operational excellence.
• Foster a culture of ownership, accountability, and high-quality engineering.
• Create clarity in ambiguous environments and help unblock teams.
• Share best practices across teams, building alignment and consistency.
• Contribute to internal communities of practice and knowledge-sharing initiatives.
• Partner effectively with Product, Design, DevOps, and executive stakeholders.
• Serve as a trusted technical advisor across functional areas.
• Clearly articulate architectural trade-offs, risks, and long-term implications.
• Provide complete, actionable, and timely technical feedback.
• Adapt complex technical topics for varied audiences with clarity and humility.

Education: Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or equivalent practical experience preferred.

Experience: 10+ years of software engineering experience.

Supervision: N/A

Certifications: AWS certification(s) preferred.

Language Skills:

Ability to read, analyze and interpret general business periodicals, professional journals, technical procedures or governmental regulations. Ability to write reports, business correspondence and procedure manuals. Ability to effectively present information and respond to questions from a variety of both internal and external sources.

Physical Capabilities: Standard categories

The physical capabilities described here are representative of those that must be met by an employee to successfully perform the essential functions of this job. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions.

While performing the duties of this job, the employee is regularly required to sit; use hands to finger, handle, or feel; reach with hands and arms; and talk or hear. The employee is occasionally required to stand and walk. The employee must occasionally lift and/or move up to 10 pounds. Specific vision abilities required by this job include close vision, distance vision, color vision, peripheral vision, depth perception, and ability to adjust focus.