Sr. Staff / Staff / Senior Engineer - Full Stack
About the role
We're seeking a Staff Engineer to work on-site in Santa Barbara. The successful candidate will be equally comfortable architecting complex systems and diving deep into implementation.
Responsibilities
Technical Leadership: Lead design and architecture across backend (Ruby on Rails), frontend (Expo/React Native), and infrastructure.
Provide deep technical expertise, guiding teams through complex architecture, trade-offs, and long-term technical investments.
Drive the technical vision and strategy in alignment with company goals.
Set and uphold high engineering standards, ensuring scalability, reliability, and maintainability in system design.
Mentor engineers on both technical depth and effective use of automation.
AI-Driven Development: Define and champion best practices for AI-first engineering workflows. Experiment with and integrate AI tools into the software development lifecycle: design, coding, testing, deployment, and operations. Build frameworks and libraries that make AI-assisted development a repeatable, scalable practice. Reduce engineering toil by leaning on automation and AI-driven observability.
Product & Platform Execution: Collaborate closely with product, design, and data teams to deliver measurable outcomes. Communicate complex technical concepts clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences. Build consensus across teams, fostering collaboration and alignment in technical decisions. Anticipate organizational technical needs and propose solutions that address company-wide challenges. Ensure reliability, scalability, efficiency and security of our solutions.
Qualifications
Technical Expertise: 12+ years professional experience in software engineering with proven full stack capability. Deep knowledge of Ruby on Rails and Expo/React Native. Experience with automated testing (Playwright, Postman, or equivalent) and integrating tests into CI/CD. Proficiency with CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions or similar). Strong grasp of distributed systems, REST/GraphQL APIs, and modern cloud architectures (AWS).
AI Enthusiasm & Practice: Hands-on experience with AI-assisted coding and automation tools. Eagerness to stay on the bleeding edge of AI development trends (prompt engineering, agent-based workflows, automated testing).
Leadership & Influence: Track record of driving architectural decisions or leading technical initiatives. Ability to mentor engineers and set technical direction across projects. Strong communication skills to work effectively across engineering, product, and leadership.
Nice to Haves
Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Pulumi / Go
Experience building dynamic infrastructure beyond Terraform.
Data & Analytics: dbt + Snowflake
Experience with modern data transformations (dbt) and cloud data warehouses (Snowflake).
Containerization & Orchestration: EKS + Helm
Familiarity with deploying and managing services in Kubernetes (EKS).
Experience with Helm for repeatable deployments and release management.
The Pay Range For This Role Is 140,000 - 350,000 USD per year(Santa Barbara, CA)