Staff Software Engineer

Staff Software Engineer

The Staff Software Engineer is a senior technical leader within the Engineering organization, responsible for influencing architectural direction across multiple domains and ensuring our platform scales efficiently and securely for over 60,000 merchants worldwide.

In this role you will lead the design, development, and evolution of large-scale distributed systems while helping shape how AI technologies including machine learning models and GenAI solutions, are integrated into our current and future products. You will guide teams toward high-impact technical solutions, mentor senior engineers, and contribute directly to building innovative, reliable systems that power the Commerce platform.

This role is highly collaborative. You will partner closely with product managers, designers, and engineering leaders across global offices to ensure shared context, customer-focused decisions, and continuous learning within our engineering culture.

BigCommerce, part of the Commerce brand family, helps merchants increase sales at every stage of their growth. From small startups to mid-market businesses and large enterprises, we provide the leading e-commerce platform. Our customers can then concentrate on what's most important: growing their businesses. We enable our customers to build, innovate, and grow, collectively reshaping the e-commerce industry.

What You'll Do

Technical Direction & Architecture

• Lead the design, development, and evolution of scalable, reliable, high-performance distributed systems
• Drive architectural discussions that span multiple domains across the platform, and participate in cross-domain architectural working groups
• Contribute to the definition and execution of our long-term technical roadmap
• Ensure technical decisions align with goals of performance, scalability, reliability, security, and maintainability

AI & Emerging Technology

• Drive initiatives to integrate AI technologies, including machine learning models and GenAI solutions, into existing and future products
• Evaluate emerging AI infrastructure and development practices, and advocate for adoption where they deliver clear customer or engineering value
• Stay abreast of advancements in distributed systems, cloud technologies, and artificial intelligence, and share that knowledge across teams

Engineering Excellence

• Build and maintain high-performance, reliable, and secure software systems.
• Lead by example in writing testable, maintainable code that meets high quality standards
• Participate in and lead in-depth code reviews, advocating for best practices that improve software quality and reliability
• Identify and address performance bottlenecks, scalability challenges, and system reliability issues
• Build tools and frameworks that enable faster, safer delivery of value by other engineers

Collaboration & Mentorship

• Collaborate effectively with software engineers, product managers, designers, and stakeholders across global teams to translate business requirements into technical solutions
• Provide technical leadership and mentorship to engineers at all levels
• Promote a culture of knowledge sharing, continuous improvement, and mentorship across teams

Who You Are

• Minimum of 10 years of professional software engineering experience delivering production systems
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field (or equivalent practical experience), plus 10+ years of professional software development experience with demonstrated leadership in technical direction and architecture
• Expertise in back-end development with two or more server-side languages (e.g., PHP, Go, Scala, Java, Python, Ruby)
• Proven experience in architecting, building, and maintaining large-scale distributed systems
• Strong understanding of distributed systems concepts, including consensus, consistency, and fault tolerance
• Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or similar) and microservices architecture
• Solid experience with SQL, in-memory storage, and other data storage solutions
• Experience operating and monitoring services in production, including familiarity with observability tooling (e.g., Sentry, Kibana, Datadog)
• Solid grasp of software design principles, testing strategies, and modern development practices
• Strong problem-solving and debugging skills
• Excellent communication skills and able to articulate design decisions and rationale across technical and non-technical audiences
• Proven track record of technical leadership and mentorship
• Comfortable navigating ambiguity and driving clarity across complex initiatives
• Passionate about learning, teaching, and promoting engineering excellence

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience building product solutions with LLMs and GenAI technologies
• Familiarity with modern AI infrastructure, such as vector databases, model orchestration tools, inference frameworks, and cloud-native ML workflows
• Experience with SaaS or multi-tenant platforms operating at significant scale

Work Where You Thrive

For candidates based in the Austin or Atlanta metro area, the position follows a hybrid work model with three days per week in the office, balancing focused individual work with meaningful in-person collaboration.

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(Pay Transparency Range: $186,000.00 - $280,000.00)