Staff Engineer

Clear evidence of significant industry experience as an individual contributor in software engineering, with the most recent years operating at Staff scope or equivalent. Scope is defined by the kind of problem owned, not the title held.

Demonstrated architectural ownership. Evidence that you have defined or significantly shaped system architecture in production that has stood the test of time — structural decisions you made, not designs you implemented.

Cross-team technical influence. Concrete examples where your work has shaped systems beyond your immediate team and thrived — patterns adopted by others, disagreements resolved across boundaries, design proposals taken up by other teams.

Production discipline. Direct ownership of systems running in production, with demonstrated work on reliability, observability, or operational improvement that survived contact with real customers.

Incident management. Track record of leading the response to production incidents — driving diagnosis under pressure, owning the post-incident review, and translating findings into structural improvements that prevent recurrence.

Strong written technical communication. Design documents, RFCs, or technical proposals that articulate complex trade-offs in writing.

Depth in at least one domain: multi-tenant SaaS systems, integration-heavy platforms, workflow or rules engines, configuration-driven architectures, real-time analytics, data pipelines, or platform infrastructure serving multiple internal teams.

Judgment on complexity. A record of making systems simpler — deprecations led, abstractions removed, boring technology chosen where it sufficed.