About the role: Respondology is seeking a Staff Engineer to ship products end to end and build the shared layers other teams build on, so our whole team moves faster. That means features on our roadmap and the foundations under them. This is an individual contributor role. Staff here means most of your week is spent building and working on hard problems.
The ideal candidate has shipped customer-facing products at a company with a high engineering bar, has scaled high-volume systems, and has built at least one foundation that other engineers adopted and that measurably sped them up.
In this role you will work with every engineer and engineering manager, and with product and design. There's no fixed lane. You'll take on the systems and features where the roadmap needs the most leverage, own them from design to production, and leave behind building blocks that make everyone after you faster. You'll set the architecture for work that spans teams, and the big calls get made with you in the room. You'll report to one of our engineering managers.
What you'll do:- Build, mostly. You spend most of the week shipping across the stack, from UI to APIs, data models and the infrastructure under them. The rest goes to planning and design.
- Scale the back end. Evolve how we store, stream and process comments as volume grows, incrementally, while the product keeps shipping.
- Turn repeated work into building blocks. Spot what teams keep rebuilding and make the next one take days, not weeks. Document it and pair on the first integrations, so teams choose it because it's the easiest path.
- Own architecture that spans teams. Review designs across teams, catch problems before they ship, and decide in writing when to invest in a foundation and when to build on what exists.
- Move measured results. Choose work by its impact across the product, and measure the result, not just the ship date.
- Keep it running. Set and meet uptime targets for the systems you own, remove whole classes of incidents, and know what those systems cost to run.
- Make AI-written code safe. Build the automated checks (linting, type checks, tests, evaluations, templates) that let the team ship high-quality AI-written code fast.
What we're looking for:- 8+ years building customer-facing software, including time at a startup or a company with a high engineering bar.
- A record of owning large, unclear projects end to end, not just incremental improvements and refactors.
- High-volume back-end experience: event streaming (Kafka or similar), data partitioning, and handling hot spots from very large accounts.
- Live systems migrated incrementally, service by service, without stopping feature work.
- Full-stack range. We run TypeScript, React and Next.js; Ruby on Rails; Python; Postgres and Kafka; AWS and Kubernetes. You don't need all of it, but you need to get productive anywhere in it fast.
- Product judgment. You care about UX, speed and polish, and you can shape a problem without a PM writing every detail.
- Clear writing. You explain trade-offs in design docs that other engineers review against.
Compensation:$200,000-$260,000 base salary, depending on experience, plus annual bonus and equity.
Location: This is a 100% remote role. Must be willing to travel to Boulder, CO approximately twice per year for on-site work with your team - and fun!
What we offer:- Competitive salary + equity
- 100% remote, with optional access to our Boulder, CO office
- Flex PTO, generous holidays, and a full week off between Christmas and New Year's
- Multiple healthcare options including FSA/HSA plans
- 401k (traditional and Roth) with company match, immediately vested
- Fully paid family and parental leave (12 weeks per year)
- Twice-yearly team offsites
What to expect:This is a startup. The pace is fast and the playbook is still being written. If you do your best work inside a fully built structure, this probably isn't the right fit. If the idea of building that structure sounds exciting, we'd love to meet you.
