Staff Software Engineer

As a Staff Software Engineer, you will be at the core of one of the most technically demanding challenges in modern web infrastructure: optimizing how web traffic is intercepted, processed, and delivered at massive scale across an edge computing platform. You will work on a system handling tens of thousands of requests per second and tens of billions of dollars of annual e-commerce volume, alongside a small, high-caliber engineering team where every engineer owns a meaningful piece of the system. This is not a ticket-execution role. You will be a technical leader in architecture and design, collaborating directly with the CTO and lead platform engineer to define how the platform evolves. You will plan rollouts methodically, define success metrics before shipping, debug complex cross-browser and cross-device behavior, and build systems that cannot fail.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and scale the core platform infrastructure handling high-volume web traffic at the CDN and edge computing layer
• Take an active technical leadership role in architecture design, technical planning, and authoring design documents with a long-term view
• Plan and execute gradual, methodical rollouts: define target audiences, KPIs, and success metrics before shipping significant changes
• Debug complex front-end behavior caused by backend platform changes across all browsers, devices, and geographies
• Collaborate with the data engineering team to ensure testability at scale and build the right measurement and observability framework
• Solve high-complexity technical problems with significant scope and ambiguity, where few established playbooks exist
• Mentor engineers and serve as a point of technical escalation for complex platform challenges
• Stay current with emerging web performance technologies, edge computing patterns, and browser optimization techniques
• Embrace and integrate AI coding tools into your engineering workflow to accelerate delivery and improve code quality

Requirements

• 10 years of software engineering experience with a strong background in building and scaling high-traffic, multi-tenant web platforms
• Expert-level proficiency in TypeScript (primary language), JavaScript (real JS, not just framework-level), and Python
• Demonstrated experience designing and operating distributed, high-availability systems at meaningful scale
• Cloud platform experience: AWS, GCP, or Azure (cloud agnostic environment)
• Experience with CDN infrastructure and web performance optimization: tools such as Cloudflare, Lighthouse, WebPageTest, and techniques such as web workers, lazy loading, and code splitting
• Infrastructure as Code experience (Pulumi or equivalent)
• Strong SQL and data querying skills; ability to work with data warehouses and build data-driven engineering decisions
• Experience with message queues (SQS, Kinesis, or equivalent) and CI/CD pipelines
• Data storage: PostgreSQL, Redshift, or equivalent
• Strong problem-solving skills and detail orientation: understands that at massive traffic scale, edge cases are not edge cases
• Active AI tool usage in engineering workflow: Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Codex, or equivalent
• Strong English communication: comfortable in technical discussions and async written collaboration with a distributed team
• Available to work full Eastern Standard Time hours
• Be legally authorized to work as independent contractor in the country where you are located
• Preferred Cloudflare Workers or edge computing experience (highly preferred given the platform architecture)
• E-commerce platform experience: Shopify, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, or similar
• Snowflake or data warehouse query optimization experience
• Media or high-traffic publishing platform background
• Experience running or leading a multi-brand or multi-tenant web platform
• Prior startup experience where you owned significant platform surface area with a small team
• Agile/Scrum experience in a distributed team environment