Sr. Staff / Staff / Senior Engineer - Full Stack

Location: Santa Barbara, CA

Department: Engineering

About the role

We’re seeking a Staff Engineer to work on-site in Santa Barbara - someone who genuinely values being in-person, working side-by-side and building things together. The successful candidate will be equally comfortable architecting complex systems and diving deep into implementation. This isn’t a traditional full stack role—it’s for an engineer who is fully committed to integrating AI Agents, automation, and AI-driven tooling into both their own workflow and the broader engineering practice.

As a Staff Engineer, you’ll set the standard for how AI-augmented engineering is done: solving hard problems across the stack, accelerating development velocity, and mentoring others to adopt AI-first ways of working.

What you'll do

• Technical Leadership
• • Lead design and architecture across backend (Ruby on Rails), frontend (Expo/React Native), and infrastructure.
  • Provide deep technical expertise, guiding teams through complex architecture, trade-offs, and long-term technical investments.
  • Drive the technical vision and strategy in alignment with company goals.
  • Take ownership of critical technical areas, ensuring projects are delivered with quality and speed.
  • Set and uphold high engineering standards, ensuring scalability, reliability, and maintainability in system design.
  • Mentor engineers on both technical depth and effective use of automation.
• AI-Driven Development
• • Define and champion best practices for AI-first engineering workflows.
  • Experiment with and integrate AI tools into the software development lifecycle: design, coding, testing, deployment, and operations.
  • Build frameworks and libraries that make AI-assisted development a repeatable, scalable practice.
  • Reduce engineering toil by leaning on automation and AI-driven observability.
• Product & Platform Execution
• • Collaborate closely with product, design, and data teams to deliver measurable outcomes.
  • Communicate complex technical concepts clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences.
  • Build consensus across teams, fostering collaboration and alignment in technical decisions.
  • Anticipate organizational technical needs and propose solutions that address company-wide challenges.
  • Ensure reliability, scalability, efficiency and security of our solutions.

Qualifications

• Technical Expertise
• • 12+ years professional experience in software engineering with proven full stack capability.
  • Deep knowledge of Ruby on Rails and Expo/React Native.
  • Experience with automated testing (Playwright, Postman, or equivalent) and integrating tests into CI/CD.
  • Proficiency with CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions or similar).
  • Strong grasp of distributed systems, REST/GraphQL APIs, and modern cloud architectures (AWS).

• AI Enthusiasm & Practice
• • Hands-on experience with AI-assisted coding and automation tools.
  • Eagerness to stay on the bleeding edge of AI development trends (prompt engineering, agent-based workflows, automated testing).
  • Ability to influence teammates in adopting AI-first practices.

• Leadership & Influence
• • Track record of driving architectural decisions or leading technical initiatives.
  • Ability to mentor engineers and set technical direction across projects.
  • Strong communication skills to work effectively across engineering, product, and leadership.

Nice to Haves

• Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Pulumi / Go
• • Experience building dynamic infrastructure beyond Terraform.
• Data & Analytics: dbt + Snowflake
• • Experience with modern data transformations (dbt) and cloud data warehouses (Snowflake).
• Containerization & Orchestration: EKS + Helm
• • Familiarity with deploying and managing services in Kubernetes (EKS).
  • Experience with Helm for repeatable deployments and release management.

About the Company

About Evidation

Evidation creates new ways to measure and improve health in everyday life—making proactive, personalized, and truly human-centered healthcare possible. By connecting directly with millions of individuals, Evidation harnesses real-world data to deeply understand health experiences, rapidly and at scale. Evidation’s privacy-centric digital health measurement and engagement platform uses data science and machine learning to translate these everyday insights into high-impact health guidance, treatments, and tools. Founded in 2012, Evidation is headquartered in California with employees working around the globe.