Staff Software Engineer

Stack

Responsibilities

• ▹Act as a technical thought leader, setting a high bar for engineering quality
• ▹Be hands-on: write code for new features, prototype, refactor existing code to meet best practices
• ▹Lead design discussions and architecture reviews for high-impact projects
• ▹Collaborate with product, design and research teams to define and evolve user-facing functionality
• ▹Evaluate trade-offs across performance, scalability, complexity and cost, and advocate for clear, maintainable solutions
• ▹Guide and mentor other engineers, raising the overall technical maturity of the team
• ▹Influence engineering culture, driving best practices in testing, observability, security and cloud design

Requirements

• ▹10+ years of experience in software engineering covering multiple large-scale, production-grade systems
• ▹Expert in at least one of JavaScript or JVM-based languages (Java/Kotlin)
• ▹Experience building and scaling distributed systems with reliability and performance in mind, covering compute and data layers and observability best practices
• ▹Strong background in cloud architecture and infrastructure design in AWS or Google Cloud
• ▹Demonstrated ability to simplify complex systems and reduce unnecessary technical debt while moving fast
• ▹Strong communication skills with a track record of aligning stakeholders, leading cross-functional efforts and influencing without authority
• ▹A deep shift-left mindset throughout the SDLC, with early integration of security, automated testing and CI/CD
• ▹Deep familiarity with AI assistants and the ability to translate AI trends into practical product improvements
• ▹Curiosity, pragmatism and a willingness to challenge assumptions

Nice to have

• ▹Experience or a strong interest in building collaborative, real-time systems

Soft skills

What we offer

• ▹Full visibility into how your work moves the product and the company forward
• ▹Individual Contributors are the highest-status role at the company
• ▹Work alongside exceptional AI and software engineers and learn from founder Andrew Filev
• ▹Work from wherever you are happiest and most productive
• ▹Equity plan so that your success follows the company's success

About the company

Zencoder builds and orchestrates AI agents that ship real work, including code, research and operations. What started as developer tooling is becoming a platform where people and agents collaborate on knowledge work. The early-stage company is led by serial entrepreneur Andrew Filev, founder of a unicorn startup.