Staff Software Engineer, Rapid Innovation
HybridEl Dorado Hills, California, United States
Job Summary
Design and build working software for new product concepts, technical experiments, and strategic initiatives by taking loosely defined ideas from concept through functional implementation with minimal specification. Define architecture and technical direction for early-stage projects, making pragmatic tradeoffs around speed, security, and scalability while working across backend, frontend, desktop, platform, integration, and infrastructure technologies. Develop backend services and APIs using Java, construct modern user experiences with JavaScript, TypeScript, and React, and integrate AI models and emerging capabilities. Evaluate unfamiliar technologies to become productive quickly, identify technical risks, and create documentation to support clean handoff to long-term engineering owners. Mentor engineers through design reviews and hands-on collaboration while partnering directly with CTO, engineering leaders, and product teams.
Required Qualifications
- 9+ years of professional software engineering experience with demonstrated breadth across multiple areas of software development
- Strong software engineering fundamentals and the ability to design and build complete applications, services and integrations
- Demonstrated experience leading technical architecture and execution for complex software projects
- Proven ability to independently take ambiguous or minimally defined ideas from concept through functional implementation
- Strong backend development experience, preferably with Java and modern service-oriented architectures
- Experience building modern frontend applications using JavaScript or TypeScript and React or similar frameworks
- Experience designing and integrating APIs, backend services, databases and third-party technologies
- Strong debugging and problem-solving skills across unfamiliar systems and codebases
- Demonstrated ability to learn new programming languages, frameworks and technical domains quickly
- Ability to make effective technical tradeoffs when speed and experimentation are more important than long-term production architecture
- Strong technical curiosity and a demonstrated history of experimenting with, building or exploring new technologies
- Proven ability to influence technical direction and mentor engineers without relying on formal people-management authority
- Experience using AI-assisted development tools to accelerate software engineering, research, debugging and prototyping
- Ability to clearly communicate technical findings, architecture decisions and handoff requirements to other engineering teams
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering or a related field, or equivalent practical experience
- 100% remote position
- Opportunity to work a hybrid schedule for candidates based in the Chicago, IL or El Dorado Hills, CA metro areas
Desired Qualifications
- Experience participating in hackathons, engineering competitions, open-source projects, technical side projects or similar build-focused environments
- Experience working at an early-stage startup, innovation lab, prototyping team or other environment with limited structure and rapidly changing priorities
- Experience with Python and/or Rust
- Experience integrating large language models, AI APIs, agents or AI-enabled workflows into software
- Experience building cybersecurity, developer tooling, desktop, infrastructure or platform products
- Experience taking a product from initial concept or prototype through technical validation and handoff
- Broad technical experience spanning multiple languages, frameworks, platforms or areas of software engineering
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