Staff Software Engineer, Platform

As a Staff Software Engineer, Platform, you will co-own the architecture and evolution of a core technology platform supporting a growing digital coaching marketplace.
You will play a pivotal role in scaling backend systems, improving reliability, and establishing engineering foundations that empower multiple product teams.
This hands-on technical leadership position combines architectural decision-making with substantial coding and system design responsibilities.
You will help shape platform strategy, drive infrastructure improvements, and ensure the platform remains secure, scalable, and resilient.
Working in an AI-native engineering environment, you will help optimize development workflows and build systems that support both engineers and AI agents.
You will collaborate closely with engineering, product, and cross-functional teams in a remote-first, asynchronous, and fast-moving startup environment.
This is an opportunity to influence technical direction at a pivotal growth stage while contributing to a mission-driven product that supports frontline professionals.

• Co-own the architecture, technical direction, and long-term health of the core platform, including its backend, database, APIs, background jobs, and internal administrative tools.

• Develop and maintain foundational platform capabilities used by multiple engineering squads, including stable APIs, service contracts, CI/CD pipelines, deployment environments, feature flags, observability, and on-call infrastructure.

• Lead end-to-end scalability initiatives by identifying and resolving bottlenecks across databases, queues, caching layers, and third-party integrations before they affect customers.

• Evaluate architectural trade-offs between maintaining the existing monolith and introducing services, queues, or event-driven boundaries where they provide measurable value.

• Document architectural decisions and implement migrations safely, minimizing disruption to existing systems and dependent teams.

• Build AI-ready platform infrastructure through modular architecture, efficient CI pipelines, reliable test environments, and secure, auditable access to production evidence.

• Strengthen platform reliability, security, and compliance through robust multi-tenant data isolation, access controls, audit trails, and incident response practices aligned with SOC 2 requirements.

• Collaborate with engineering teams through design reviews, code reviews, technical mentorship, and hands-on problem-solving to maintain consistency and quality across the platform.

• Partner with Product and other engineering squads to establish priorities, evaluate roadmap trade-offs, and balance platform investments against feature development.

• Drive the adoption of AI coding agents throughout the software development lifecycle, including implementation, code review, testing, incident triage, and maintenance.

• Establish effective guardrails, verification workflows, and human approval processes to ensure AI-assisted development remains reliable and secure.

• Contribute directly to production code while setting engineering standards and helping the team deliver maintainable, scalable, and high-quality software.

• At least 8 years of experience building and operating production backend systems, including recent experience at Staff Engineer, Lead Engineer, or equivalent technical leadership level.

• Strong product mindset, with the ability to understand customer needs, challenge assumptions, and collaborate with Product and Design teams to shape technical and product roadmaps.

• Extensive platform engineering experience, including ownership of infrastructure, deployment pipelines, runtime environments, and operational systems for a growing product.

• Demonstrated experience scaling production systems through significant growth, including identifying performance bottlenecks, investigating root causes, and implementing effective solutions.

• Strong relational database expertise, particularly with MySQL or PostgreSQL, including schema design, query optimization, indexing, and migrations involving live production data.

• Hands-on experience with cloud infrastructure, preferably AWS, as well as containers, infrastructure as code, and CI/CD practices.

• Experience designing and operating asynchronous and distributed systems, including queues, workers, webhooks, idempotency, and retry mechanisms.

• Proven ability to establish technical direction, influence engineering teams, and drive architectural decisions without relying on formal management authority.

• Daily, hands-on experience with AI coding agents, including understanding their capabilities, limitations, and the processes needed to review and validate generated code.

• Experience developing AI agent tooling or engineering harnesses, such as skills, MCP servers, evaluation loops, or guardrails for agents interacting with production systems.

• Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to produce clear technical documentation and explain architectural trade-offs to engineers and product stakeholders.

• Preferred qualifications: Experience with PHP and Laravel, including Horizon, Nova, and queues. Candidates with strong backgrounds in Go, Python, Ruby, Node.js, Java, or similar technologies are also encouraged to apply.

• Experience modernizing or decomposing monolithic applications without relying on disruptive, large-scale rewrites.

• Familiarity with observability tools such as Sentry, Datadog, or equivalent platforms, along with incident management and response.

• Experience with SOC 2, HIPAA, or other compliance frameworks in production environments.

• Experience integrating scheduling, calendar, SMS, or email providers at scale.