About the role

We're hiring a Staff Software Engineer to tackle some of the hardest technical problems at Onebrief - the kind that don't yet have a clear owner, a defined scope, or an obvious solution. We operate in a squad-based model: small, focused teams that form around outcomes and dissolve when the work is done. At the Staff level, you're not just effective within that model; you're one of the people who makes it work. You define technical direction before squads spin up, build the foundations that squads depend on, and bring coherence to decisions that would otherwise fragment across teams.

Our platform spans a modern full stack: a React/TypeScript frontend, Node.js backend services, cloud-native infrastructure, and authentication and identity systems. You'll operate across all of it, not just as a contributor, but as someone who shapes how we build.

About You

You're energized by problems that are technically hard and organizationally complex. You don't wait for scope to be handed to you. You identify the highest-leverage work and pull it into focus. You've seen enough systems succeed and fail to have strong opinions, but you hold them lightly enough to change your mind when the evidence warrants it. You treat AI tooling not just as a productivity multiplier but as something worth thinking carefully about at the system level: how it changes the way teams build, review, and reason about code. You care deeply about the engineers around you and measure your own success partly by how much better they get.

What You'll Do

• Define and drive cross-squad technical strategy, identifying systemic gaps, proposing architectural direction, and seeing complex initiatives through from framing to delivery.
• Shape the conditions for squads to succeed: establish durable abstractions, shared patterns, and platform primitives that reduce friction across teams rather than within one.
• Operate in the highest-ambiguity spaces: problems that aren't yet well-formed enough to assign to a squad, where your job is to bring clarity and make them tractable.
• Drive architectural decisions that outlast any single squad rotation, balancing long-term system health with the pragmatic pace of a high-velocity org.
• Establish and evolve engineering norms: how the team uses AI-assisted development, what good code review looks like, and how we reason about build vs. buy vs. adopt decisions.
• Mentor and elevate engineers across squads, not through formal programs, but through the quality of your reviews, your RFCs, and how you show up in technical conversations.
• Partner with product and engineering leadership to shape the roadmap from a technical perspective, surfacing constraints and opportunities that aren't visible without deep system knowledge.

What We Look For

• 12+ years of software engineering experience, with a track record of technical ownership that spans teams, not just projects
• Demonstrated ability to set architectural direction at the org or platform level, not just within a team's scope
• Fluency across the full stack, with the depth to go from frontend architecture to infrastructure trade-offs as the problem demands
• Experience building in a squad or rotation-based model, or the clear instincts of someone who would thrive in one
• Strong understanding of distributed systems, API design, data modeling, and cloud-native infrastructure at scale
• Active and sophisticated use of AI coding tools, with a point of view on how they should be used well, not just used
• Exceptional communication: the ability to write RFCs that get alignment, give feedback that lands, and make complex trade-offs legible to non-technical stakeholders
• Comfort in ambiguity: you make progress without waiting for full clarity, and you bring others along rather than disappearing into a problem

Nice to Have Qualifications

• Background in mission-critical or high-compliance domains (FedRAMP, SOC2, DoD)
• Experience with authentication and identity infrastructure at scale (OIDC, SAML, federated identity)
• Prior experience in a high-growth B2B SaaS environment scaling through significant inflection points
• Familiarity with event-driven architectures and the trade-offs of async-first system design

Core tech we use

• Frontend: React, TypeScript, Vite, shared component libraries, client-side observability
• Backend: Node.js, PostgreSQL, Redis, secure RESTful APIs, distributed services
• Authentication & Authorization: Keycloak, OpenID Connect (OIDC), SAML 2.0, OAuth 2.0, ABAC, JWT, federated identity provider integrations
• Infrastructure: Kubernetes, AWS, Terraform, CI/CD pipelines, container security and secrets management
• Integrations: CSV/Excel/KML importers, PDF exports, DoD and enterprise data systems, secure API gateways, auditing pipelines