Staff Software Engineer - Remote (United States)

Why this job is exciting · The role: · We are seeking a highly experienced and motivated Staff Software Engineer to join our company. As a Staff Engineer, you will operate across multiple teams to define and drive technical strategy, tackle broadly defined and deeply complex prob ...

Job description

Why this job is exciting

The role:

We are seeking a highly experienced and motivated Staff Software Engineer to join our company. As a Staff Engineer, you will operate across multiple teams to define and drive technical strategy, tackle broadly defined and deeply complex problems, and act as a force multiplier for the department or major project area. You will be fully independent, require little direction, and set a high technical bar through architecture, execution, and coaching, without directly managing people.

You'll operate at the "system level" across a massive, complex distributed platform where improvements in performance, reliability, and scalability have immediate, company-wide impact. This role is built for an engineer who not only solves hard problems, but consistently identifies the right problems to solve, turning ambiguity into clarity, and complexity into durable systems and standards.

Responsibilities:

• Lead performance and scalability initiatives across our distributed system: identify bottlenecks, run deep investigations, and deliver measurable improvements (latency, throughput, cost, reliability).
• Own ambiguous, high-impact technical problems end-to-end: problem selection, proposal, alignment, implementation strategy, rollout, and validation.
• Drive technical direction across teams by setting architecture patterns, reliability/performance standards, and shared best practices.
• Serve as a technical leader and coach: elevate the team through design reviews, pairing, mentoring, incident/post-mortem leadership, and raising engineering rigor.
• Influence roadmaps and priorities by partnering with engineering leadership, product, and other stakeholders, ensuring we invest in the highest-leverage work.
• Strengthen operational excellence: observability, incident response, resiliency design, capacity planning, and safe deployment practices.
• Build durable systems: make improvements that last, reducing complexity, improving maintainability, and increasing developer velocity.

Requirements:

• Minimum 10 years of professional software engineering experience, with a significant portion focused on building, operating, and improving large-scale production systems.
• Demonstrated experience delivering major performance, reliability, or scalability wins in large-scale, distributed systems.
• Expert-level ability in root-cause analysis, systems thinking, and turning unclear symptoms into actionable solutions.
• Strong programming background; experience with Go (Golang) and/or Python is highly valued (but not required if you can ramp quickly).
• Strong experience with relational databases and SQL technologies (e.g., PostgreSQL, MySQL), including schema design, query optimization, indexing strategies, and performance tuning in high-scale environments.
• Deep understanding of distributed systems fundamentals (e.g., consistency, latency, backpressure, caching strategies, concurrency, failure modes).
• Experience leveraging modern AI developer tools (e.g., Claude, Cursor, GitHub Copilot) to improve engineering productivity, including establishing team standards, workflows, and guardrails for safe/high-quality usage.
• Hands-on experience building or integrating AI agents / LLM-powered systems (prompting patterns, tool/function calling, RAG where applicable), with an emphasis on reliability, evaluation, observability, and consistency of outputs in production.
• Track record of leading through influence: aligning multiple teams, setting standards, and driving adoption without direct authority.
• High bar for engineering quality: secure, maintainable, observable, and scalable-by-design services.
• Experience with modern deployment and runtime environments (e.g., AWS/GCP/Azure, Kubernetes, Docker, CI/CD).
• Comfortable owning production outcomes: incident leadership, post-mortems, and continuous improvement.

You are motivated by:

• Hustle: You inspire others to work as hard as you. You will find a way, no matter how hard the task is.
• Ownership: You have an owner/builder mentality. You care about what you deliver and own your mistakes.
• Proactivity: You don't wait for someone to tell you what to do or what problems to solve. You are always looking for ways to learn and improve.
• Excellence: You set a high bar and surpass expectations.  You hit your goals and ask for more.
• Humility: You are not above any task in the organization and are willing to drop what you're doing to help a teammate. 

What you can expect from us

The team:

Capacity team members enjoy the opportunity and benefits of working at an artificial intelligence startup, but with leaders who've worked at places like Apple, Ebay, Visa, , Oracle, Boeing, and many more world-class companies. The culture at Capacity encourages innovation, independent problem solving, and collaboration as we continue to mature our product in the ever-changing world of AI.

We provide:

• Employer-paid health insurance (for you and your eligible dependents)
• Profit Interest Units/incentive compensation
• Unlimited vacation policy
• 401(k) with a company match
• Short term disability insurance
• Group life AD&D insurance
• A supportive, diverse workplace where we prioritize respect for each other and our clients
• A fun and collaborative team culture

Still unsure?

At Capacity we value more than just hard skills.  Our goal is to build a holistic and diverse team.  If you aren't sure if you qualify, just apply  We will carefully consider your application and are always grateful for any time and effort invested in Capacity.  

But wait, there's more

At Capacity we believe in more than just building amazing products and helping our customers.  Although we are a remote workforce, we remember the neighborhood where we started. We still strive to elevate our community by furthering access to education and careers in the tech space. Our affiliated nonprofit, Create A Loop, brings rigorous computer science courses to underserved communities with little to no access to formal computer science education.  There are many opportunities for our Capacity team members to serve and educate our Create A Loop students throughout the year.