Staff Software Engineer (Hands-on Architect)

Accountabilities: You will own the complete engineering lifecycle, from understanding business problems and evaluating technical options to shipping reliable software and continuously improving it. Your responsibilities will include: Translate business needs and loosely defined product requirements into technical plans, prototypes, production features, and iterative improvements. Design pragmatic architectures that balance development speed, simplicity, security, reliability, scalability, and infrastructure costs. Build full-stack solutions, including user interfaces, backend services, APIs, integrations, data models, and background processing workflows. Own production delivery across automated testing, CI/CD, cloud deployment, observability, troubleshooting, and performance optimization. Evaluate unfamiliar technologies, validate assumptions through focused experiments, and select tools and frameworks based on practical requirements. Use AI coding assistants, agents, and automation to accelerate research, implementation, testing, debugging, and documentation. Review and validate all code, including AI-generated output, while maintaining appropriate testing standards, documentation, and operational safeguards. Collaborate directly with product and business stakeholders to clarify requirements, challenge assumptions, define scope, and deliver meaningful increments. Strengthen engineering practices through design discussions, code reviews, reusable components, and knowledge sharing. Identify technical risks and trade-offs early, take responsibility for resolving them, and ensure delivered systems remain maintainable and ready to evolve. Requirements The ideal candidate is an independent and technically versatile engineer with a strong record of delivering production software. You should combine deep technical expertise with sound product judgment, strong ownership, and the ability to work effectively with limited supervision. Proven experience independently building and shipping production software, with ownership across multiple stages of the product lifecycle. Deep expertise in at least one backend ecosystem and strong working knowledge of modern frontend development, databases, APIs, and cloud infrastructure. Broad understanding of development tools, frameworks, and architectural approaches, with the ability to explain trade-offs and choose the simplest effective solution. Ability to become productive quickly in unfamiliar codebases, technologies, and technical environments. Strong understanding of system design, data modeling, asynchronous processing, caching, queues, authentication, authorization, and application security. Hands-on experience with automated testing, CI/CD pipelines, containers, monitoring, and production incident diagnosis. Practical experience using AI development tools for substantial engineering tasks, including task decomposition, context preparation, code review, and result verification. Strong debugging and problem-solving skills across application code, infrastructure, data, and third-party integrations. Sound product judgment, including the ability to prioritize essential functionality, reduce unnecessary scope, and make effective build-versus-buy decisions. Clear communication skills, strong accountability, and the ability to make progress independently while seeking feedback when valuable. Additional experience that would be an advantage: Experience as an early engineering hire, founding engineer, or technical owner of a product built from scratch. Background developing SaaS platforms, multi-tenant systems, data pipelines, or integration-heavy products. Experience building LLM-powered features, agent workflows, or internal automation. Experience optimizing cloud infrastructure costs, application performance, and production reliability. Familiarity with conversion APIs, server-side tracking, or advertising platform APIs. Benefits Opportunity to join a stable, bootstrapped, and profitable startup environment. Competitive compensation. Employee-friendly ESOP programme. Work-from-anywhere flexibility with the freedom to organize your own working hours. Access to coworking spaces when you want an alternative to working from home. Health coverage for you and your family. International exposure through collaboration with clients and partners across the Gulf, Europe, Africa, India, APAC, and the United States. Annual company offsite and a relaxed, informal working culture. Transparent compensation discussions, with no salary-history requirements.