Staff Software Engineer

About the role

As a Staff Software Engineer for John Deere World Headquarters located in Chicago, IL, you will lead architecture, design, and implementation of complex, multisystem solutions across multiple digital products. You will analyze business needs, define system specifications, and drive platform standardization while mentoring engineers and promoting best practices in engineering, design, documentation, and operational readiness.

Responsibilities

• Lead architecture, design, and implementation of complex, multisystem solutions across multiple digital products
• Analyze business needs and define system specifications and architectural requirements
• Lead design reviews that ensure high quality, maintainable, scalable, reliable, and secure software and data products
• Develop coding standards, integration patterns, and data pipeline standards in partnership with architects and principal engineers
• Provide expert full stack leadership, defining patterns and enabling delivery across React/Redux front ends, Java/Spring Boot and Python microservices, and secure REST APIs (Java, Spring, Node, serverless), while enforcing secure by design practices and mentoring engineers to apply them consistently
• Lead the definition, implementation, and validation of non-functional requirements, including scalability, reliability, performance, availability, and security
• Guide teams in designing for operational excellence, including resilience, fault tolerance, disaster recovery, and production readiness
• Establish observability standards using platforms such as New Relic, Datadog, CloudWatch, or Grafana, ensuring services are instrumented with high quality logs, metrics, traces, dashboards, and alerts
• Drive platform standardization efforts by shaping reusable architectural patterns, shared components, and common frameworks across Global IT
• Mentor and coach junior and senior engineers to build deep technical capability across stacks
• Promote best practices for engineering, design, documentation, code review, and operational readiness
• Stay current with emerging technologies, engineering trends, and cloud native practices; continuously upskill and adapt to evolving business needs
• Evaluate new tools, frameworks, and patterns to determine their strategic fit for long term architecture and platform evolution
• Collaborate with Product Managers, UX, Architecture, and cross functional teams to shape product roadmaps
• Represent engineering in strategic discussions and help define long term technology direction
• Promote a culture of learning, continuous improvement, and knowledge sharing across Global IT
• Lead AI assisted engineering practices by shaping agent oriented development patterns (prompt design, tool orchestration, guardrails) that accelerate delivery while preserving code quality, security, and traceability
• Practice and scale Vibe Coding as a core discipline—use AI pair programming to draft code, tests, and documentation at speed, and validate outputs rigorously through reviews, static analysis, and automated testing before merge

Requirements

• 8 or more years of experience designing and developing backend applications using Java frameworks, servlets, J2EE, and Spring or Spring Boot
• 6 or more years of experience developing front end applications using JavaScript, HTML, CSS, React, and Redux
• 4 or more years operating cloud native systems in AWS or Azure, including containers (Docker) and orchestration (Kubernetes or EKS)
• 4 or more years building serverless applications using AWS Lambda and API Gateway or equivalent
• 5 or more years designing and integrating databases with technologies such as MongoDB, DynamoDB, and relational databases
• Proven ability to work with architects, product leaders, and principal engineers to align technology strategy
• Experienced in designing secure systems, applying security by design principles, and implementing authentication and authorization frameworks such as OAuth, OIDC, and SAML
• Demonstrated ability to lead design reviews, mentor engineers, and influence teams across organizational boundaries
• Hands on observability expertise instrumenting services and creating actionable dashboards/alerts with New Relic, Datadog, CloudWatch, or Grafana; strong grasp of metrics, logs, traces, SLOs/SLAs, and on call readiness
• Non functional engineering leadership designing for scalability, reliability, performance, and availability, including load shedding, autoscaling, partitioning, caching, and high availability/failover pattern

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or closely related field

Skills

• AWS or Azure cloud certifications
• Experience with event driven architectures and distributed messaging
• Experience contributing to or defining cross team architectural patterns
• Strong communication and stakeholder alignment skills
• Experience applying AI assisted engineering (agentic workflows, prompt patterns, secure guardrails) to improve speed and quality
• Proficiency with Vibe Coding practices and agentic development, including disciplined review and verification of AI generated code, tests, and documentation

Pay

$141,132.00 - $211,692.00 + Benefits