Staff Engineer

Staff Engineer (Lead Software Engineer)

The Staff Engineer (Lead Software Engineer) helps own and evolve one or more product verticals on a Kotlin/JVM, event-oriented platform that powers self-service business and commerce for Inductive Automation's customers and partners. Working closely with engineering and product leadership, you'll help define and evolve technical direction and lead the design processes that turn ambiguous needs into shipped, operable systems. You'll contribute meaningfully across the full delivery lifecycle, evaluation and trade-off analysis, domain and data modeling, architectural design, implementation planning, hands-on implementation, deployment, and operational ownership, and raise the level of the engineers around you as you do it. This is a full-time role with onsite, hybrid, or remote opportunities available.

Responsibilities

• Demonstrating success leading large, strategic, or complex areas that have clear impact to the success of Inductive Automation
• Helping evolve architectural direction for one or more verticals and contribute to cross-cutting platform concerns, moving the system toward it incrementally
• Leading the design lifecycle: requirements discovery → RFC/PRD → design → implementation plan → delivery → deployment → operation. Maintaining decision records
• Developing and evolving domain and data models; defining context boundaries and mappings
• Delivering projects with broad organizational impact; decomposing them into well-scoped, maintainable pieces for the team
• Quickly analyzing and resolving tactical issues across a wide variety of areas
• Maintaining deep technical domain knowledge of the platform's apps, services, contexts, and frameworks
• Designing systems, frameworks, and platform interfaces/APIs intended to succeed long-term across module and service boundaries.
• Improving developer workflow, tooling, and deployment in ways that measurably aid delivery velocity (this isn't a CD-focused role, but velocity is a first-class concern)
• Using negotiation and patience to collaborate with other senior leaders, ensuring progress and setting the example for others
• Collaborating across teams and disciplines to resolve technical debates and reach durable decisions; using influence and patience with other senior contributors
• Mentoring engineers on distributed-systems design, event-sourced/CQRS patterns, JVM/runtime reasoning, data modeling, and engineering judgment
• Influencing senior leaders on engineering strategy
• Defining technical strategy and executes to improve products, infrastructure, processes, or organizations
• Completing thoughtful and constructive code reviews in a timely manner
• Participating in the hiring process, as needed (by submitting referrals, meeting candidates, attending recruiting events, or presenting externally)
• Participating in conducting engineering interviews, as needed
• Responsible for one or more product areas or other IC leadership role (Product Lead, Scrum Master)

Requirements

• Excellent written and verbal communication, able to document issues, designs, and trade-offs clearly and concisely (RFC/PRD-quality writing)
• 12 years of general software engineering industry experience
• Excellent analytical and troubleshooting skills
• Strong programming skills on the JVM, Java required; Kotlin strongly preferred
• Deep understanding of JVM compile-time and run-time semantics, with the ability to reason about concurrency and performance
• Experience in distributed-system design and trade-off analysis, beyond RESTful CRUD / entity-oriented microservices
• Experience with asynchronous, event-oriented architecture
• A demonstrated, articulate understanding of the system-design implications of distributed CQRS and/or event-sourced systems, able to speak to the trade-offs
• Strong data and domain modeling skills, including bounded-context definition and context mapping
• Proficiency with SQL and the relational-modeling judgment behind it
• Demonstrated track record of full-lifecycle product delivery, a meaningful or leading role in evaluation, modeling, architectural design, implementation planning, implementation, deployment, and operational management
• Ability to rapidly assimilate a large, unfamiliar codebase and a non-trivial architectural paradigm, and become productive quickly
• Experience designing platform-wide interfaces/APIs and reasoning about codebase modularity and boundary enforcement
• Ability to translate business goals into effective designs and implementation plans
• Familiarity with agile methodologies such as SCRUM
• Familiarity with source control management systems such as Github
• Ability to accurately and effectively document ideas and specifications