Senior Staff Software Engineer

Senior Staff Software Engineer

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.