Staff Software Engineer, First Resonance

• We’re hiring a Staff Software Engineer who is an exceptional backend engineer equally comfortable writing production-grade application code and architecting the AWS cloud infrastructure it runs on
• This is a role for a systems thinker who wants to split their time between scaling our backend codebase and optimizing our cloud footprint
• If you love building elegant APIs and configuring the Kubernetes clusters or terraforming the AWS environments that support them, you’ll thrive here
• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a proven track record of shipping production-grade backend code and owning infrastructure
• Strong hands-on coding skills in modern backend languages (e.g., Python, Go, Node.js). Note: This is a coding-heavy role, not a pure DevOps or configuration position
• Deep AWS Expertise: Demonstrated experience building, deploying, and managing complex systems on AWS (EC2, EKS/ECS, RDS, VPCs, IAM, etc.) using Infrastructure as Code (e.g., Terraform)
• Systems Thinking: Deep understanding of distributed systems, relational databases, caching, message queues, and API design
• Leadership: Track record of leading large technical initiatives across teams or across a complex codebase

Desirable

• Write and Architect Backend Code: Build, scale, and maintain high-performance backend services and APIs that power the ION Factory OS
• Bridge Code and Infrastructure: Own the relationship between our application layer and our AWS infrastructure. You’ll ensure our cloud architecture perfectly supports our software delivery
• Own Architecture at Scale: Evaluate and evolve our backend and cloud architecture to support massive growth in customers, data volume, and product surface area
• Drive Reliability and Uptime: Establish and improve reliability practices (SLOs/SLIs, incident response, postmortems, capacity planning) at both the application and infrastructure levels
• Performance Leadership: Identify systemic bottlenecks; lead optimization initiatives across application code, databases, caching, async processing, and AWS services
• Build Leverage for the Team: Create scalable primitives (libraries, patterns, CI/CD tooling, paved roads) that enable product teams to ship code faster with less risk
• Mentor and Set the Technical Bar: Coach engineers on backend best practices, operational maturity, and cloud architecture; lead by example through hands-on delivery
• What success looks like (first 90 days)
• Ship high-quality backend code to production while gaining a deep understanding of our current AWS infrastructure
• Produce a clear, prioritized backend and infrastructure assessment: current-state risks, near-term hardening plan, and a 6–12 month scaling roadmap
• Lead at least one high-impact initiative that materially improves application uptime, database performance, or developer velocity