Senior Software Engineer

About the Company:

Stable Kernel is a technology services firm and custom software developer building scalable software solutions for cutting-edge, innovative enterprises to move their business forward. We are headquartered in Atlanta, GA.

We're a privately held, Great Place to Work Certified Company™ with a multi-award-winning culture and an impressive 10-plus-year trajectory of sustainable growth. At Stable Kernel, we support our employees in ways that help them do some of the best work of their lives.

About the Role:

As a Stable Kernel Senior Software Engineer , you play an essential role in setting our portfolio of world-class clients up for success through the development and delivery of their most innovative, transformational initiatives. You will collaborate daily with other engineers and product team members, make decisions that influence the path of a product roadmap, leverage software development best practices, and become a more well-rounded engineer as you learn new technologies. Your knowledgeable practice, reliability, and consultative nature make you an engineer that stakeholders and teammates trust.

Senior Software Engineers may be classified as individual contributors or people managers with individual contributor responsibilities.

Core Responsibilities Include:

• Technical Impact:
• Designing and implementing solutions with an eye to the growth of the product and team, improving the speed of future work, and preserving optionality without unnecessary complications.
• Providing expert feedback that improves the overall delivery of work and defending the work against compromise and corner-cutting by having the final say in codebase additions.
• Designing test strategies and having involvement in automated testing, continuous integration, and deployment processes for projects
• Mentoring others in best practices.
• Ensuring a high standard of quality across the project.
• Identifying, diagnosing, and resolving complex bugs and issues.
• Business Alignment:
• Understanding the client's business and goals and using them to improve the definition of teams' projects.
• Identifying opportunities to provide additional value for our clients by suggesting and delivering improvements based on observations.
• Contributing to the estimation of work for high-level planning and costing that clearly identifies gaps, risks, and assumptions.
• Interacting with Others:
• Coordinating with people outside your team, including product and design leadership.
• Influencing the roadmaps of other teams, especially to get work prioritized that's required for your own team.
• Advising people across the Director and VP-levels of the organization.
• Reporting status for the whole team with a general understanding of where each member's work is.
• Autonomy & Ambiguity:
• Designing and supporting long-term roadmaps with limited direction and requiring no direction on project plans.
• Considering and planning around cross-team dependencies to most effectively break down work across the team.
• Working within ambiguity to define and break down challenging projects (e.g., projects that are hard to derive benefits from until the end of the project, projects that are very large, or projects that have a lot of uncertainty or require novel solutions).
• Problem-Solving:
• Analyzing the effectiveness of decisions and demonstrating accountability for outcomes.
• Making trade-offs between short-term and long-term solutions.
• Evaluating trade-offs others are making.
• Anticipating, recognizing, and mitigating risks to prevent potential roadblocks.
• Escalating issues and bringing recommended solutions to the table.
• Leadership:
• Taking ownership and contributing to process improvements that positively impact the work.
• Advocating for best practices across your project or client program.
• Mentoring junior and intermediate colleagues by helping them grow professionally.
• Setting a positive example by using our company values and imperatives as a north star.
• Providing regular constructive feedback.
• Resolving conflicts.
• Guiding less experienced colleagues through complex projects.
• Leading team learning sessions.
• Leading projects.
• Demonstrating strong project roadmapping skills, including planning, delegating, and monitoring progress.
• Making critical decisions and driving projects to successful completion.
• Representing the team in client conversations.

Intimate, Working Familiarity With:

• Go: Design, build, and maintain scalable backend services using Go, applying effective concurrency patterns, testing practices, and performance optimizations in production environments.
• AWS: Develop and operate cloud-native applications on AWS using services such as ECS, Lambda, API Gateway, RDS/DynamoDB, S3, and CloudWatch; contribute to secure, reliable, and cost-conscious cloud solutions.
• Strong experience architecting, designing, and implementing backend services with an emphasis on high test coverage at all levels - unit, integration, contract, and end-to-end.
• Experience creating and executing automated tests within CI/CD pipelines using quality gates to ensure reliability and maintainability (e.g. GitHub Actions, CircleCI, Jenkins).
• Experience with test infrastructure and environments that support backend service validation, including service virtualization and mocking in CI/CD workflows.
• Experience conducting backend performance and load testing to assess system scalability, latency, and throughput under production-like conditions.

General Requirements:

• 7-10 years of development experience with an emphasis on back-end development.
• Experience serving as a trusted consultant to stakeholders and cross-functional teams, providing expert guidance on backend service design, delivery, and integration.
• A curious technologist who explores AI augmented development workflows, leveraging tools such as Anthropic models, Cursor, Copilot with Open Spec, Spec Kit, and related frameworks.
• Degree in Computer Science or relevant field or experience.

Nice to Haves:

• Experience working with Spring Boot microservices to migrate them to modern, well-structured, and scalable gRPC services.
• React: Experience contributing to or guiding frontend development using React, enabling effective collaboration across the full stack and supporting cohesive, user-centric application design.
• Familiarity with Databricks for data processing and analytics workloads

A Bit More Info:

Minimum Base Compensation: $140,000

This is a full-time position.

Stable Kernel operates a People Before Place Hybrid model, allowing most employees to choose where they can do their best work most days.

Minimal travel is associated with this role.

Our generous total compensation package includes:

• Company-subsidized health, vision, and dental plan premium options beginning on the first day of employment
• 401k with above-average company matching
• Fully paid Group Life, Short and Long Term Disability, and AD&D insurance
• Optional Flexible Spending Account and Health Savings Account participation
• Voluntary Life, Critical Illness, and Accident insurance
• EAP and Health Advocacy program available at no cost to employees and their dependents
• $3000+ annual industry educational budget
• Paid time off and paid holidays Access to Perks at Work program featuring a variety of discounted products and services

*Note - We are not sponsoring employment visas at this time. If you are currently in possession of an employment visa, it will need to be effective for at least 3 years from the date of your application for your candidacy for employment to be considered.

Stable Kernel's culture is inclusive and expansive. We celebrate diversity in its many glorious forms and do not discriminate based on race, religion, color, national origin, gender role orientation, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.

However, we will discriminate against those unwilling to comply with the practice of our company values:

• we work with integrity always
• we respect our work and each other
• we are dedicated to life-long learning and sharing
• we stay hungry for new challenges

If you are like-minded in this regard, we hope you will apply. We look forward to meeting you.