Senior Staff Software Engineer

Team: IT

Location: US

Commitment: Full-time

Workplace Type: remote

Accountabilities:

• Shape the platform’s technical vision and roadmap in partnership with engineering and R&D leaders, aligning priorities with broader organizational goals.

• Build strong partnerships with domain experts and specialist teams, treating platform and data capabilities as products and translating shared needs into reusable services.

• Design, develop, and operate scalable platform systems, guiding architectural decisions through design reviews, prototypes, and pragmatic technology choices.

• Lead complex, business-critical initiatives from planning through delivery, managing tradeoffs, sequencing work into incremental milestones, and delegating effectively.

• Support platform users by resolving complex technical issues and turning recurring problems into lasting improvements in reliability, performance, and capacity.

• Champion AI adoption by helping teams with different technical backgrounds identify and apply useful AI tools and workflows.

• Build and improve infrastructure that enables secure, cost-effective agentic workflows and LLM-powered applications, while using AI to increase platform engineering productivity.

• Improve cloud cost visibility and lead optimization initiatives that reduce waste without compromising performance, reliability, or scientific productivity.

• Mentor and develop engineers through technical pairing, design reviews, delegation, and constructive feedback, while promoting a collaborative, high-performing culture.

Requirements:

• 12+ years of relevant software engineering experience, or equivalent, ideally in platform engineering, delivering complex systems from design through production.

• At least 3 years leading complex, cross-team initiatives, aligning stakeholders, communicating technical tradeoffs, and enabling delivery without relying on formal authority.

• At least 3 years building and operating production platforms using Infrastructure as Code on a public cloud, preferably Azure or Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

• Strong Python proficiency and experience with at least one additional high-level programming language.

• Deep understanding of Linux internals, networking, and virtualization, with hands-on system-level troubleshooting and performance tuning experience.

• Strong Kubernetes expertise, including ownership of advanced capabilities such as controllers, operators, custom resource definitions (CRDs), admission control, scheduling, autoscaling, service mesh, or multi-cluster networking.

• Sound judgment in distributed systems and platform architecture, including governance, capacity planning, reliability, cost management, data processing, and storage.

• Demonstrated software architecture leadership, including writing clean production code, clear design documentation and architecture decision records (ADRs), and facilitating constructive technical reviews.

• A track record of helping engineers and domain experts grow, strengthening teams’ capabilities and independence.

• Experience partnering with specialist teams such as data science, AI/ML, computational biology, or related technical disciplines to improve their workflows.

• Hands-on experience with AI-assisted development and building reusable tools or workflow automation.

• Preferred additional experience or interest in life-sciences software, next-generation sequencing (NGS) pipelines, biological data, MLOps, machine learning, deep learning, and scientific Python frameworks.

• Familiarity with workflow orchestration, distributed compute on Kubernetes, cloud migrations, multi-cloud or multi-region operations, columnar processing, open lakehouse technologies such as Apache Iceberg, and FinOps practices is an advantage.

Benefits:

• Base salary range of $188,275–$270,375 USD for new hires in the United States.

• Eligibility for equity and cash bonuses.

• Medical, financial, and other employee benefits, depending on the position offered.

• Remote work within the United States.

• Occasional travel to the headquarters in Brisbane, California, approximately two to three times per year.