Staff Software Engineer, Owner.com

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience at high-growth startups or large scale platforms
• Demonstrated experience leading architectural design for large, distributed systems
• Experience breaking down monoliths into service-oriented architectures or microservices
• Deep expertise in scaling backend systems to handle high throughput and complex operational concerns
• Strong understanding of auth systems, security boundary design, and distributed identity
• Clear decision-making in ambiguous technical situations
• Excellent communicator — able to articulate trade-offs to engineers and cross-functional partners

Desirable

• We are looking for a mission-driven Staff engineer who is passionate about their craft and committed to building incredible products for our customers
• We’re seeking a Staff Engineer to join our Core Architecture Team, a small, senior group of engineers responsible for solving the hardest technical problems across the platform
• This is a deeply hands-on role
• You will spend a significant portion of your time designing, building, and shipping production code in the most critical parts of our system, while also providing architectural leadership across teams
• This is not an ivory-tower architect position — success in this role requires comfort operating directly in complex codebases, debugging real production issues, and owning end-to-end execution of high-risk technical initiatives
• Safely decomposing our monolithic backend, writing and owning the new systems that replace it
• Redesigning distributed authentication and authorization systems, including implementation and rollout
• Architecting and building for 100× platform scale, with hands-on ownership of performance, reliability, and cost
• Building an AI-powered "Software Factory" — a multi-agent system that takes engineering tasks from ticket to PR, orchestrated via Temporal, Slack, and sandboxed Kubernetes dev environments
• Pioneering practical AI-assisted development — dynamic tool curation, multi-channel human-in-the-loop workflows, and "fast-fail" guardrails that know when to hand back to a human
• Setting technical direction by doing the work, not just reviewing it
• Driving engineering standards, tooling, and fundamentals across teams
• Mentoring technical leaders and influencing the engineering direction of the company
• Design, implement, and maintain core backend systems that are foundational to the platform
• Write production code in high-impact areas, including services, shared libraries, infrastructure, and tooling
• Define the security boundary for autonomous agents — user identity propagation, task-scoped tool access via a centralized Tool Shed, and sandboxing to limit blast radius
• Lead the execution of technically complex projects end-to-end, from design through rollout and iteration
• Debug and resolve hard production problems involving scale, data consistency, performance, and reliability
• Drive architectural decisions through prototypes, code, and real implementations, not just diagrams
• Establish patterns and best practices for service boundaries, APIs, data ownership, and distributed systems
• Partner with engineering teams to guide major refactors and platform migrations
• Make pragmatic technical trade-offs that balance velocity, quality, and long-term maintainability
• Partner with product, engineering, and platform teams to execute technically complex projects
• Make high-leverage architectural decisions under uncertainty, with clear trade-offs
• Turn vague problems into clear technical strategies and execution plans
• Raise the technical bar through deep code reviews, design discussions, and hands-on collaboration
• Mentor senior engineers and help grow future technical leaders
• Influence engineering direction by being a trusted technical partner who ships high-quality systems