Staff Engineering Manager

Role Description

As a Staff Engineering Manager, you will lead and mentor engineering teams across a variety of technical domains. You will drive architectural decisions, ensure engineering excellence, and deliver innovative solutions that impact core freight movement operations.

• Lead a team of 6-10 engineers, guiding end-to-end technical execution.
• Drive technical vision and strategy across distributed systems.
• Mentor junior and senior engineers, fostering a culture of technical excellence.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to align on technical solutions.
• Ensure secure coding practices and platform reliability.
• Own architecture for large-scale systems and make critical technical decisions.
• Translate railroad business requirements into scalable digital solutions.
• Establish engineering best practices, observability, and technical debt management.
• Demonstrate operational excellence by monitoring, troubleshooting, and resolving production issues, including participating in a 24/7 on-call rotation.

The duties and responsibilities in this posting are representative categories to be used in deciding whether to apply for this position. This is not an exhaustive list of the position’s duties.

Qualifications

• Authorized to work in the US.
• Minimum of 9 years’ experience as a software engineer and/or manager.
• Minimum of 6 years' experience as an engineer.
• 6+ years of programming experience in at least one modern language (e.g., Java, JavaScript, TypeScript, etc.).
• Experience with distributed systems and technologies such as Kafka, RabbitMQ, API gateways, SQL/NoSQL/Graph databases, caching systems, and serverless platforms.
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines, Git workflows, and DevOps practices.
• Experience building enterprise products leveraging open-source platform and infrastructure technologies.
• Familiarity with observability stacks (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry).
• Experience with secure coding practices and platform security principles.
• Ability to work in cross-functional teams and communicate with stakeholders.
• Experience participating in design reviews, incident retrospectives, or RFC processes.
• Demonstrated ability to learn new technical concepts and adapt quickly.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills.
• Experience leading multiple teams and delivering cross-organizational platform and products.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree or higher in computer science, or related field.
• Able to work now and in the future without BNSF’s assistance (whether monetary, through sponsorship, or otherwise) in obtaining, maintaining, or extending employment authorization (including H-1B, STEM OPT/CPT, or TN nonimmigrant status).
• 6+ years of full software development life cycle, including coding standards, code reviews, source control management, build processes, testing, and operations experience.
• Engineering experience with a public PaaS or cloud provider (AWS, Azure or GCP).
• Experience developing and operating large scale distributed systems in production.
• Experience with serverless runtimes and event-driven architectures.
• Familiarity with developer tooling as a builder and/or user.
• Interest in sustainable infrastructure and cost/resource awareness.
• Experience with single-pane-of-glass management platforms or control planes for distributed systems.
• Familiarity with frameworks like React, Angular, Node.js, Spring Boot.

Benefits

• An industry-leading 401(k) and renowned Railroad Retirement program.
• A range of robust health care options for you and your dependents (including domestic partners), including medical, dental, vision, telemedicine, mental health, cancer support, and high-quality care network options.
• Health care spending accounts (HSA) with employer contributions, as well as life and disability insurance, provided at no cost.
• Family benefits including parental, pediatric and family building support, adoption and surrogacy reimbursement, and dependent care spending account (with employer match).
• Access to discounts on travel, gym memberships, counseling services and wellness support.
• Annual bonus (Incentive Compensation Program).
• Generous leave / time off policies.