Staff Software Engineer, Quality & Reliability

What You Will Do

Define and drive BuildOps’ technical strategy for engineering quality, production reliability, and safe software delivery.
Identify systemic sources of customer-impacting failures and lead cross-team initiatives that address root causes rather than individual symptoms.
Establish architectural principles, engineering standards, and paved roads that make reliable system design and safe delivery easier by default.
Partner with engineering teams during system and product design to improve resilience, operability, testability, and failure isolation before implementation begins.
Build or guide the development of shared platform capabilities for release safety, automated validation, production feedback, test data, environment management, and developer self-service.
Advance BuildOps’ observability strategy so teams can understand system behavior, detect regressions quickly, diagnose failures, and make informed reliability investments.
Improve how we validate interactions across services, data boundaries, financial workflows, and other business-critical systems.
Define meaningful measures of quality and reliability, then use them to identify priorities and demonstrate improvements in customer and engineering outcomes.
Lead technical programs that span multiple teams and organizations, aligning stakeholders and driving decisions without relying on direct authority.
Mentor engineers and technical leaders, raising the organization’s ability to reason about risk, reliability, and quality throughout the software lifecycle.
Evaluate BuildOps’ existing practices and technology objectively, evolving or replacing them when they no longer meet our needs.
What Success Looks Like

Success in this role is measured by durable improvements in outcomes, not by the number of alerts, dashboards, tests, or frameworks created. Examples include:

Fewer customer-impacting defects and recurring classes of production failures.
Greater release confidence and a lower change-failure rate.
Faster detection, diagnosis, and recovery when failures occur.
Shorter, more reliable feedback loops for engineers making changes.
Clearer ownership and better visibility into the health of critical systems and workflows.
Increased engineering velocity without sacrificing safety or reliability.
Broad adoption of shared practices and platform capabilities without creating a centralized quality bottleneck.
What We Look For

Significant software engineering experience, including operating at Staff or equivalent scope on ambiguous, cross-cutting technical problems.
A track record of leading multi-team initiatives that improved production reliability, software delivery, platform capabilities, or engineering effectiveness.
Strong systems thinking and the ability to connect architecture, data integrity, operational behavior, developer workflows, and customer impact.
Experience designing and operating distributed systems in a cloud environment such as AWS.
Strong software design and programming skills in TypeScript, Java, or another relevant language.
Experience with several of the following: observability, resilience engineering, CI/CD, release safety, automated validation, developer platforms, testability, performance engineering, or incident learning.
The ability to define useful engineering measures while avoiding metrics that reward activity without improving outcomes.
Demonstrated success influencing architecture and engineering practices across teams that do not report to you.
Strong written and verbal communication, including the ability to explain technical risks, tradeoffs, and strategy to engineering, product, and business stakeholders.
A practical approach that balances long-term direction with incremental improvements that deliver value quickly.
Who You Are

You think in systems and look for leverage across organizational and technical boundaries.
You are energized by ambiguous problems whose solutions require architecture, implementation, influence, and organizational change.
You challenge assumptions and distinguish underlying causes from visible symptoms.
You enable teams rather than becoming a gatekeeper or permanent dependency.
You are comfortable moving between long-term technical strategy and hands-on implementation when necessary.
You build credibility through sound judgment, clear communication, and measurable results.
You care deeply about the experience of both our customers and the engineers building for them.
Compensation:

$172,000 – $229,000 base salary + annual bonus + meaningful equity

What we offer:
Generous equity grant, become an owner in our company!
A comprehensive benefits package
Flexible PTO and hybrid work schedules
One-time work-from-home allowance
Hubs in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Toronto, and Raleigh with hybrid work schedules and lunch provided for in-office days
Company events and team-building activities, both in-person and virtual
Fast-paced, collaborative, and dynamic work environment
Opportunities for growth and career advancement
Chance to work with cutting-edge technology and innovative solutions
The chance to get in on the ground floor and build something truly groundbreaking for ourselves and our amazing customers