Senior Staff Software Developer

Role Description

The Growth Engineering team is focused on bringing new AI-driven product ideas to life—from early experimentation through to scalable, customer-facing solutions. Engineers on this team work across the full product lifecycle, balancing rapid iteration with thoughtful system design. As a Senior Staff Software Developer, you’ll define architecture, guide technical strategy, and make high-impact contributions to products that are still taking shape.

We’re looking for a Senior Staff Software Developer who can lead across complex technical work, leading the design, development, and scaling of AI-powered applications and agent-driven experiences built on the Workiva platform. This role is ideal for an experienced engineer who thrives at the intersection of hands-on building and technical leadership. Someone who can navigate ambiguity, drive architectural decisions, and influence across teams to deliver meaningful business outcomes.

What You’ll Do

• Deliver outcomes
  • Partner with engineering teams to co-deliver complex work across platform modernization, product evolution, and new product initiatives.
  • Adapt your approach to match the needs of the work, whether the priority is speed, scale, or long-term maintainability.
  • Use AI-native development practices to build automation, validation, and engineering harnesses that improve quality and leverage.
  • Help establish thoughtful code review and pre-production quality practices that support fast, reliable delivery.
• Execute technical strategy
  • Lead technical direction for large, cross-team initiatives aligned to long-term platform strategy.
  • Design systems that balance flexibility, scalability, and maintainability.
  • Anticipate future constraints and evolve architecture before problems reach scale.
  • Identify and resolve performance, reliability, and architectural bottlenecks.
  • Drive early-stage exploration for ambiguous problems, including work where the answer becomes clear through prototyping and building.
• Develop AI systems and platform enablement
  • Build infrastructure that embeds AI into engineering workflows.
  • Design tools and patterns that reduce manual effort through automation and intelligent assistance.
  • Create guardrails that support safe, reliable AI-assisted development.
  • Help define system behavior by capturing specifications from code, tests, logs, and the people closest to the work.
• Influence and lead
  • Raise the technical ceiling of the teams around you.
  • Drive alignment across teams and influence key technical decisions.
  • Reduce ambiguity and help teams make better decisions faster.
  • Create durable artifacts such as runbooks, decision logs, and tests that can be handed off and evolved by others.
  • Share context across product domains to help solve problems more effectively.

Qualifications

• 6+ years of experience building and scaling enterprise software systems.
• Experience leading technical strategy and architecture across teams.
• Hands-on experience with agentic AI development, including shipping real work with AI as a primary development collaborator.

Requirements

• Experience driving high-impact initiatives across multiple teams.
• Experience improving engineering quality through TDD, BDD, load testing, stress testing, chaos testing, invariant testing, mutation testing, or similar approaches.
• Strong systems thinking and judgment, including awareness of second-order effects.
• Demonstrated proficiency in at least two delivery modes: platform modernization, iterative product evolution, and high-ambition greenfield development.
• Ability to operate as a force multiplier for other engineers.
• Depth in a domain that materially improves system design or developer experience.
• Proven experience operating at Staff+ level across multiple teams or domains.
• Strong background in distributed systems and platform architecture.
• Experience inferring behavioral specifications from existing systems through code, tests, logs, and subject-matter experts.
• Ability to deliver production-quality outcomes in a small, time-boxed team setting.
• Strong written communication skills and a habit of creating useful, durable artifacts.

Benefits

• Workiva is the platform designed to bring confidence, control, and a competitive edge to the world’s most complex organizations.
• Our AI-powered platform unifies finance, risk, and sustainability on a single, secure foundation—ensuring data is trusted, traceable, and ready to act on.
• With an unbroken path from source to output, leaders gain confidence in their numbers, visibility into current and emerging risks, and the ability to move with speed and precision in a constantly changing world.
• Workiva supports employees in working where they work best - either from an office or remotely from any location within their country of employment.