Senior Staff Software Engineer

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.