Top Staff Software Engineer Jobs in San Francisco, CA

Lead the architecture and evolution of Cloudflare’s global network infrastructure. Own capacity planning, hardware and platform strategies, routing and traffic engineering standards, multi-year infrastructure roadmaps, and network automation frameworks. Evaluate emerging technologies, optimize cost and reliability, guide major architectural transitions, and collaborate with engineering, procurement, finance, and operations teams. Mentor engineers and influence technical decisions across the organization.

Lead a small engineering team in building AI-native products from customer discovery through production and adoption. Partner with product and design, run hypothesis-driven experiments, engage directly with users, and own architecture, instrumentation, quality, and telemetry. Mentor engineers, set technical standards, deliver incremental releases, and make pragmatic decisions that connect engineering work to customer outcomes.

Own and improve Gusto’s signup-to-activation experience across web, SMS, WhatsApp, and AI assistants. Build full-stack, customer-facing products from data models through UI; prototype AI-powered onboarding; partner with Product, Design, and Data; measure and iterate on outcomes; create modular foundations; and provide technical leadership, mentorship, and high-quality engineering standards.

Build and operate highly reliable card-issuing software and tooling across authorization, clearing, settlement, certification, and network integrations. Serve as a technical expert on card-network specifications, protocols, mandates, and production behavior. Lead complex cross-team engineering work, debug protocol-level issues, influence network requirements, mentor engineers, improve platform reliability, and participate in on-call support for critical financial systems.

Staff Software Engineer responsible for building and operating Block’s card issuing platform at the network boundary. The role requires deep expertise in card networks, ISO 8583, authorization and clearing flows, certifications, mandates, and direct network connectivity. Responsibilities include writing production code, developing conformance tooling, debugging protocols, leading cross-team technical initiatives, influencing network requirements, mentoring engineers, supporting AI-assisted development, and participating in on-call operations for critical financial systems.

Design, develop, deploy, and maintain scalable customer-facing software, APIs, workflows, and data-driven services. Define technical requirements, create implementation plans, automate and test releases, review code and architecture, and drive technical decisions. The role includes mentoring engineers, identifying technical gaps, maintaining engineering excellence, and serving as a product-domain expert while collaborating with product managers, data scientists, team leads, and managers.

Lead the technical roadmap for partner integrations across APIs, SDKs, and web experiences. Design and build scalable products, standardize external partner integrations, and deliver payment and data-sharing capabilities. Collaborate with Engineering, Product, Design, Infrastructure, Sales, Partner, and Customer Success teams while remaining hands-on. Drive architecture, code quality, delivery, stakeholder alignment, and technical strategy for high-impact fintech products.

Lead the architecture, development, and scaling of data pipelines and infrastructure for a customer-facing Data Lake platform. Build ETL and ingestion systems using GCP, Debezium, Pub/Sub, Dataflow, BigQuery, Python, Golang, and SQL. Establish engineering standards, deliver strategic projects, mentor engineers, influence cross-functional technical decisions, optimize data services, and shape the platform roadmap.

Lead software engineering for the Patient Onboarding team, building and improving registration, insurance verification, and care-access workflows. Write full-stack production code, lead complex cross-team initiatives, shape technical direction, improve engineering foundations, and support modern AI-enabled development practices. Collaborate with Product, Design, Analytics, and Engineering to improve patient conversion and system reliability.

Designs, builds, and scales backend services and integrations for payments, billing, identity, and partner connectivity. Sets technical vision and architecture for distributed systems, leads cross-team delivery, manages production rollouts, builds fault-tolerant services and data pipelines, and mentors engineers. The role partners with product, design, and engineering teams to deliver frequent, reliable improvements for Flex’s rent payment platform.

Build and own full-stack MarTech services, scalable APIs, event-driven systems, data pipelines, and customer-facing web experiences. Integrate advertising, analytics, messaging, and marketing platforms while supporting attribution, identity resolution, experimentation, acquisition, and retention. Collaborate cross-functionally with marketing, product, data, design, and engineering teams to launch measurable growth initiatives. Mentor engineers and establish technical best practices across high-scale marketing infrastructure.

Design and build scalable services, APIs, platform capabilities, and product features. Own architecture and technical decisions, improve reliability and engineering practices through testing and operations, collaborate cross-functionally, mentor engineers, and help guide team direction.

Lead technical vision and software engineering excellence for Capital One’s Card Tech team. Build production-ready, AI-native systems; design distributed, scalable, fault-tolerant architectures and API platforms; ensure performance, security, and operability; decompose complex problems; mentor engineers; recruit talent; and share technical knowledge across the organization.

Develop, integrate, validate, and field autonomy software for unmanned air, maritime, space, and expendable platforms. Lead feature crews or sub-programs, author interface contracts, coordinate with autonomy, perception, C2, and platform partners, and mentor engineers. Own mission-ready builds, hardware/software integration, live testing, debugging, performance optimization, simulation-based issue reproduction, and continuous process improvement. Travel 10–20% for customer sites, integration events, and mission tests.

Design and develop tactical autonomy algorithms and high-performance software for unmanned systems. Implement behavior architectures, planning, decision-making, multi-agent coordination, and hybrid rule-based/machine-learning autonomy. Integrate capabilities with perception, simulation, hardware, and flight-test teams; deploy to real platforms; support field testing and flight demonstrations. Analyze mission data, troubleshoot performance, research new algorithms, and adapt solutions for defense programs. Travel is typically 10–15% annually.

Leads technical direction for autonomous pilot integration across multiple unmanned-platform programs. Develops and deploys C++ autonomy software, integrates onboard systems, validates through simulation and hardware testing, troubleshoots embedded systems, and supports live field missions. Drives architecture, interoperability standards, documentation, process improvements, and cross-team collaboration. Mentors senior engineers and team leads, represents engineering to customers and partners, supports hiring, and travels approximately 10–20% for integration and test events.

Design and develop high-performance autonomy software for unmanned aircraft and multi-agent systems. Implement tactical behaviors, planning, decision-making, coordination, and hybrid rule-based and learning-based autonomy. Integrate capabilities across perception, simulation, hardware, and flight-test teams; deploy and validate software on real platforms; analyze mission data; and contribute to technical roadmaps. Lead technical direction, mentor engineers, manage full software lifecycles, and support defense programs, integration events, and field testing.

Own the architecture and technical strategy for Square’s go-to-market systems. Build and operate production AI agents, automated workflows, and integrations that improve sales productivity. Lead complex initiatives through architecture, implementation, testing, deployment, and operations while establishing AI evaluation, observability, security, reliability, and human-oversight practices. Partner with Sales, Product, Data, and Engineering leaders to translate business needs into scalable solutions, make build-versus-buy decisions, mentor engineers, and improve business impact through data and user feedback.

Own the architecture and technical strategy for Square’s go-to-market technology stack. Build and operate production AI agents, automated workflows, and integrations that improve sales productivity. Lead complex technical initiatives, establish AI reliability and security guardrails, define evaluation metrics, and guide build-versus-buy decisions. Partner with Sales, Product, Data, and Engineering leaders while mentoring engineers and remaining hands-on across design, implementation, testing, deployment, and operations.

Own the multi-year technical strategy and architecture for Coinbase’s enterprise IAM platform spanning human, AI agent, service, and workload identities. Drive adoption across 700+ systems, establish authentication and authorization standards, lead migrations and build-versus-buy decisions, automate audit and regulatory controls, reduce standing privilege, and mentor senior engineering talent. Partner across Security, Compliance, IT, Infrastructure, and product teams while influencing technical direction without direct authority.

Lead technical strategy and execution for multi-quarter initiatives, build and maintain software systems using AI, mentor and elevate engineers, collaborate across disciplines, and protect user privacy and security. The role involves working in an AWS and Kubernetes environment with technologies including Python, TypeScript, React, Go, Airflow, dbt, and Claude Code.

Leads architecture and technical direction for scalable, high-availability software services. Owns complex, multi-team initiatives, makes autonomous technical decisions, partners cross-functionally, mentors engineers, establishes standards, and advocates for quality. The role develops mission-critical systems supporting millions of endpoints and requires deep Java expertise, scalable system design, API development, relational databases, and strong testing practices.

Design, build, and operate high-throughput, low-latency ad-serving infrastructure processing millions of requests per second. Optimize GPU-powered TensorRT inference, feature stores, model serving, benchmarking, experimentation tooling, and system reliability. Partner with machine learning engineers to productionize models and own systems through design, deployment, observability, capacity planning, incident response, and optimization.

Build and productionize agentic workflows, RAG pipelines, AI services, backend systems, and ML pipelines for sales automation. Integrate Salesforce, quoting engines, data lakes, and internal platforms using scalable, event-driven architectures. Lead 0-to-1 development of tools for account research, lead prioritization, and quoting while ensuring reliability, observability, performance, and resilience across the GTM technology stack.

Provides architectural and technical leadership for institutional exchange systems, including matching engines, order management, market data, risk, and unified trading platforms. Leads ultra-low-latency distributed-system design, cross-team technical alignment, reliability standards, incident response, and multi-quarter initiatives. Maintains hands-on engineering contributions while mentoring senior engineers and developing technical leadership across teams.