Staff Software Engineer job description

Software engineering — Staff
Sets technical direction across teams and unblocks their work.

RESPONSIBILITIES
- Negotiate cross-team interfaces with their consumers and set your team's conventions and deprecation policy, judging when a breaking change is worth its migration cost.
- Set the performance budgets a product ships against.
- Set the accessible component patterns your team reuses and the checks that run on each change.
- Design systems spanning several components and teams where requirements are contested, setting the design approach others follow and sizing it to the need.
- Lead integration across systems owned by different teams or suppliers, negotiating the contract and cutover plan and surfacing each side's assumptions before they cause an outage.
- Take decisions that bind several teams under uncertainty, making the tradeoff visible and reopening a decision publicly when the evidence changes.

REQUIREMENTS
- Experience at the Senior Software Engineer level (level 3 of 5) or equivalent

REQUIRED SKILLS
Software Development
- Programming and Build — You can set the programming conventions your team follows, including for changes of high technical complexity.
- Modern Development Standards — You can apply modern development standards to complex multi-team work and lead others in adopting them, writing down the tradeoff of any deliberate exception.
- Code Review — You can set your team's review bar for high-risk changes such as data migrations, security fixes and cross-team interfaces, and coach reviewers whose feedback is vague or discouraging.
- Debugging and Diagnosis — You can lead diagnosis of intermittent and production-only failures, and decide when to stop investigating and mitigate instead.
- Refactoring — You can plan and land a structural change across several components, keeping it reversible and visible to affected teams and arguing for it by delivery cost.
- Version Control — You can define the branching and release workflow your team uses, and recover from incidents such as a rewritten shared branch or a secret committed to history.
- API Design — You can negotiate cross-team interfaces with their consumers and set your team's conventions and deprecation policy, judging when a breaking change is worth its migration cost.
- AI-Assisted Development — You can set how your team uses AI coding tools, including which tools are approved and what extra review AI-generated changes get.

Testing and Quality
- Test Design — You can shape the test approach for a whole product across teams, and remove tests that cost more to run than the risk they cover.
- Test Automation — You can set the automation strategy for a product, deciding what runs where, on what trigger and what blocks a release, and evaluate tooling against real needs rather than novelty.
- Performance Optimization — You can set the performance budgets a product ships against.
- Accessible Front-End Development — You can set the accessible component patterns your team reuses and the checks that run on each change.

Systems and Design
- Systems Design — You can design systems spanning several components and teams where requirements are contested, setting the design approach others follow and sizing it to the need.
- Systems Integration — You can lead integration across systems owned by different teams or suppliers, negotiating the contract and cutover plan and surfacing each side's assumptions before they cause an outage.
- Architectural Decisions — You can take decisions that bind several teams under uncertainty, making the tradeoff visible and reopening a decision publicly when the evidence changes.
- Schema and Query Design — You can design the data model for a whole service, including how it will evolve, and set your team's schema conventions, correcting query patterns that will not scale.
- Prototyping and Spikes — You can use prototypes to take risk out of complex work and set how far a spike runs before the team commits, reporting when one disproves the preferred option.
- User Focus — You can represent users in cross-team technical decisions and challenge plans that would make the product harder to use.

Operations and SRE
- Continuous Delivery — You can design the delivery approach for a product, covering how changes are gated, released progressively and rolled back.
- Observability and Monitoring — You can set the observability approach for a product, removing alerts that page people without user impact and making sure each new service ships instrumented.
- Production Incident Response — You can lead a severe or unclear incident across several teams, deciding when a partial mitigation is enough, and run reviews that produce change rather than blame.
- Availability and Capacity — You can keep a service inside its agreed targets by forecasting demand from real usage and adding capacity before it runs short.
- Infrastructure as Code — You can design a product's infrastructure codebase and set patterns other teams reuse, bringing manually built resources under code and keeping each plan small enough to review.

Security and Data
- Application Security — You can run your product's vulnerability handling, from taking in a report and ranking it by severity to shipping the fix and telling customers.
- Secure Data Handling — You can set how a product handles sensitive data with legal and privacy colleagues, and map its data flows so compliance can be shown rather than asserted.
- Dependency Management — You can set how a product takes on, tracks and retires dependencies, including the software bill of materials it keeps for each release.

Delivery
- Project Management — You can keep several people's work in step across teams, agree priorities and hand-offs with them, and keep one shared task list that all of them actually use.
- Planning & Estimation — You can estimate work that spans several teams, name the assumptions behind each figure, and rework the plan when those assumptions break.
- Ownership & Accountability — You can hold accountability for outcomes delivered mostly by other people, taking the blame when it fails and passing on the credit when it works.
- Quality Focus — You can set how quality is checked on complex work shared by several teams, and you spot the problems that only appear where their pieces meet.

Craft
- Problem Solving — You can make the call on a problem outside your expertise and explain its cost, time and risk.
- Domain Expertise — You can bring in methods that have worked outside the organization, adapt them to how the work is done here, and check that they improve the results.
- Continuous Learning — You can judge which new ideas are worth the team's time and which are not, and you make room for the people around you to learn too.
- Digital Tools & AI Use — You can decide where AI and automation fit in several teams' work, set the human checks and data rules they follow, and help people adopt the tools safely.

Communication
- Communication — You can bring disagreeing groups to agreement on the facts and the next steps, and help colleagues frame a difficult or sensitive message.
- Collaboration — You can align teams with competing priorities on a common goal, surfacing the conflict early instead of letting it harden into resentment.
- Writing & Documentation — You can own the documents behind a large piece of work, coordinating contributions so that people who were not involved can carry it on.
- Stakeholder Management — You can hold senior and external relationships, negotiate between competing demands, and deliver unwelcome news without losing trust.

Leadership
- Leadership — You can lead work that crosses team boundaries without formal authority, explain the calls you make, and create room for others to lead.
- Mentoring — You can develop other mentors, coach people through career decisions rather than tasks, and lift the capability of a whole team.
- Strategic Thinking — You can set direction for an area, choose deliberately what not to do, and defend that choice when it is challenged.