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Job Description
What You’ll Do:
The Senior Staff Software Engineer is one of Nue's senior-most individual contributors, responsible for shaping the technical direction of the platform across multiple product teams. This role sets the multi-year technical strategy in their domain, drives the architecture decisions that other teams build on, and operates as a force multiplier for engineering — through code, design, mentorship, and judgment. The Senior Staff is the engineer leadership turns to when the stakes are highest: a critical architectural pivot, a platform decision that will shape the next two years of velocity. They lead through technical excellence, deep system understanding, and a track record of consistently making the right call.
Set multi-year technical direction
- Define the technical roadmap for a major platform area (e.g., lifecycle management, billing, integrations, data platform) across multiple teams and quarters.
- Make build-vs-buy and platform-vs-feature trade-offs at the company level, with clear written rationale.
- Sequence the technical investments that unblock the company's largest customers and the next two years of growth.
- Bring a strong, well-reasoned point of view to architecture reviews — and the credibility to push back on leadership when the data warrants it.
Architect systems other teams build on
- Design and lead the implementation of foundational systems — distributed services, data flows, APIs, integrations, and shared libraries — that span product teams.
- Lead non-trivial migrations and modernizations: HA upgrades, language/framework moves, monolith decompositions, schema changes, multi-region rollouts.
- Set the technical standards for service ownership, API contracts, observability, and reliability that every team adopts.
- Own the architecture of one or more business-critical flows end-to-end (e.g., quote-to-cash, billing, sync).
Ship code that matters
- Stay deeply hands-on. Lead the implementation of the highest-leverage and highest-risk projects yourself.
- Write code that becomes the reference example for what "good" looks like at Nue.
- Pair with senior and staff engineers on the hardest problems; unblock teams stuck on technical depth.
Drive customer outcomes through engineering
- Be the technical owner for the engineering work that unblocks Nue's largest customers.
- Convert ambiguous customer asks into bounded engineering work with clear scope, owners, and dates.
- Be on the call when production is on fire for a strategic customer — and be the senior-most engineer making the call to roll forward, roll back, or escalate.
Coach and mentor other engineers
- Mentor and develop Staff and Senior engineers across the company. Help two or three of them grow into Staff or Senior Staff over the course of the year.
- Embed deep technical thinking into design reviews, code reviews, and engineering planning across product teams — not just your own.
- Build internal tools, shared libraries, and AI-assisted workflows that let every engineer ship faster.
- Champion engineering excellence: testing, observability, security, performance, and operational maturity.
Drive engineering excellence at the org level
- Help define the engineering standards the org operates against — testing strategy, observability bar, security posture, dev productivity, code review norms.
- Partner with engineering managers, the CTO, and product leadership to translate strategy into engineering execution.
- Champion AI-assisted engineering as a first-class capability — prompt libraries, agents, and internal tooling that compound the team's leverage.
- Raise the bar in hiring: act as a bar-raiser, calibrate levels, and grow the senior IC pipeline.
Be the company's senior technical voice
- Represent Nue's engineering org in critical customer conversations, vendor evaluations, and partner integrations where deep technical credibility is required.
- Contribute to public engineering presence where it serves the company — talks, posts, OSS — without losing focus on internal impact.
What You’ll Bring:
- 12+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a sustained track record of operating at Staff level or higher in a high-bar engineering org.
- Demonstrated track record of designing and shipping foundational systems used by multiple teams — services, frameworks, data infrastructure, or shared platforms.
- Deep expertise in at least one modern backend stack (Java/Spring, Node/TypeScript, Python, Go, or similar) with strong fluency in at least one more, plus the design judgment to know when each fits.
- Strong systems-design ability: distributed systems, data modeling, consistency trade-offs, performance, scaling, and reliability — proven on systems with significant production load.
- Hands-on production expertise across cloud infrastructure (AWS / GCP / Azure), Kubernetes, CI/CD, and observability tooling (OpenTelemetry, Prometheus / Grafana, or equivalent).
- Strong fluency with AI coding tools (Claude Code, Copilot, or similar) and a track record of materially accelerating both your own work and your team's through them.
- Demonstrated track record of leading a team or org through a significant architectural transition (HA migration, language/framework move, multi-region, monolith → services).
- Track record of mentoring senior and staff engineers; multiple engineers will say you were materially responsible for their growth.
- Excellent written and verbal communication; comfort defending technical positions in front of executive leadership.