Staff Engineer I

The Staff Engineer replaces the legacy Principal Engineer role as a trusted technical authority for a broad business domain.

Your primary leverage comes from aligning teams, spreading best practices, and growing other engineers so the whole department moves faster and safer.

You do not manage people; you manage technical complexity. ● The Solver: Parachute into the hardest technical challenges spanning multiple teams to remove volatility and ambiguity. ● Design Ownership: Own high-level design for multi-service capabilities, ensuring security and scalability are embedded from the start. ● Technical Project Leadership: For large strategic initiatives, you step in as the technical lead, driving the architecture and execution strategy across multiple engineering teams. ● Tracer Bullet Code: Write the complex cores and skeletal systems that other teams build upon. ● Bar Raising: Serve as the primary approver for critical-path design reviews and major technical initiatives. ● Promotion Endorsement: Act as a formal contributor in Senior-level performance evaluations; no Senior Engineer can be promoted without your evidence-based endorsement. ● Execution Focus: While the VSTL looks years ahead, you ensure the current quarter is executed with technical excellence. ● AI-Native Engineering: Lead the adoption of agentic tooling, LLM workflows, and AI automation within your team to accelerate the development lifecycle. ● You have 10+ years of experience with a strong track record in designing and delivering complex software systems. ● You are T-shaped, possessing deep expertise in one area with broad competence across the full stack. ● You excel at "Influence Without Authority," shaping decisions across teams through expertise and persuasion. ● You are highly craft-focused and proactive in addressing cultural and technical debt.