Top Staff Software Engineer Jobs in San Francisco, CA

Architect target-state applications and modernize legacy banking systems into microservice and event-driven platforms. Define technical vision, architecture, API standards, and design practices while ensuring scalability, performance, security, and operability. Provide hands-on technical leadership, mentor engineers, support cross-divisional initiatives, lead architectural reviews, and promote engineering excellence across technology and product teams.

Design, build, and own scalable microservices and secure APIs that transfer value across blockchain and banking protocols. Extend in-house blockchain infrastructure, integrate with banks and cloud services, troubleshoot production issues, document system and testing procedures, and collaborate with product and engineering teams to deliver reliable payment experiences.

Lead complex card-acquiring projects from design through production, building reliable payment systems, tooling, testing frameworks, and network integrations. Work hands-on with ISO messages, routing, authorization, clearing, settlement, reconciliation, interchange, and tokenization. Set technical direction, mentor engineers, improve reliability, participate in on-call operations, and establish standards adopted across teams. The role requires deep acquiring expertise and experience operating large-scale financial systems.

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.

Build and evolve Braze’s Canvas messaging orchestration platform across backend systems and customer-facing interfaces. Provide technical leadership across teams, drive architecture and complex projects, mentor engineers, improve reliability and observability, and deliver foundational frameworks and code. Collaborate with engineering leadership to support scalable messaging channels, real-time and batch processing, automated customer journeys, developer tooling, and enterprise-scale product growth.

Build scalable backend systems that process and analyze millions of contracts. Design pipelines orchestrating LLMs, data extraction, and clustering algorithms; develop highly accurate search and retrieval systems; and collaborate with lawyers and product teams to create AI-powered contract solutions.

Develop and deploy full-stack generative AI products, including high-performance user interfaces, backend systems, LLM orchestration pipelines, data extraction, clustering, and contract analysis at scale. Collaborate with designers, lawyers, and engineers to build innovative legal technology products and improve how lawyers work with contracts.

Lead the design, development, and operation of SoFi’s AI developer experience platform, including AI Gateway, model routing, evaluation systems, harness vending, and cost telemetry. Establish engineering standards, guide architecture and cross-team execution, improve CI/CD and operational reliability, mentor engineers, and partner with internal developers to drive adoption of AI coding tools. Ensure secure, compliant use of AI systems and maintain the platform’s technical vision.

Leads architecture and technical strategy for enterprise AI developer experience, including AI gateways, model routing, evaluation platforms, harness vending, and AI economics. Drives cross-team initiatives, resolves distributed-system bottlenecks, establishes engineering standards, leads incident response, evaluates AI tooling, and mentors senior and staff engineers. Requires hands-on experience with LLM architectures, model APIs, AI-assisted development tools, evaluation pipelines, dynamic routing, platform infrastructure, and infrastructure economics.

Design, implement, operate, and scale critical backend services, including identity, social graph, and persistence systems. Collaborate across teams to deliver product solutions, ensure availability and operational excellence, test and debug code, and participate in incident resolution. The role requires technical leadership, distributed-systems expertise, and effective use of AI development tools while maintaining security, performance, and production-quality standards.

Lead technical strategy and execution for Affirm’s account management team, building secure, scalable fullstack systems and customer account security experiences. Collaborate with product, design, analytics, and engineering teams; establish quality, monitoring, testing, and operational standards; support availability and on-call practices; communicate technical decisions; and mentor engineers.

Staff Software Engineer responsible for technical strategy, scalable full-stack systems, team operations, reliability, monitoring, code quality, and talent development. The role involves building customer-facing card experiences and backend services using Python or Kotlin, AWS, MySQL, Spark, Kubernetes, and React-based frameworks. The engineer will own features end to end, collaborate cross-functionally, manage technical risks and trade-offs, support on-call health, and apply AI safely to improve development and customer experiences.

Lead large-scale initiatives for a high-performance Linux-based network sensor, improving ingestion, scalability, continuous capture, queue reliability, observability, and production diagnostics. Own root cause analysis and postmortems, establish engineering standards, translate business goals into technical plans, and mentor engineers through design and code reviews. The role requires deep Rust expertise, distributed systems experience, concurrent programming, packet capture, message brokers, and cybersecurity best practices.

Own the architecture and technical direction for provider-sourced client products, including lead management, caseload migration, AI-powered inquiry workflows, and provider marketing tools. Partner cross-functionally with product, design, data, sales, customer experience, and pricing teams. Build reliable user-facing systems, guide technical decisions across teams, measure product impact through experimentation, and influence teams without direct authority.

Architect and operate Affirm’s large-scale Amazon EKS compute platform, including cluster lifecycle, node management, autoscaling, shared components, infrastructure automation, workload safety policies, observability, cost and capacity optimization, and self-service workflows. The role drives technical strategy, mentors engineers, partners cross-functionally, and participates in on-call incident response.

Lead the architecture, integration, and adoption of Taskrabbit’s experimentation and feature-flagging platform. Build high-performance TypeScript APIs and foundational services, integrate with Ruby on Rails systems, and improve platform reliability, scalability, and developer experience. Mentor engineers, establish experimentation strategy with product and engineering leaders, and advise senior leadership on architecture and platform initiatives.

Lead the architecture and adoption of shared platform capabilities, including authentication, identity, event-driven systems, and API infrastructure. Build TypeScript APIs and foundational services, integrate with Ruby on Rails systems, improve performance, reliability, security, and developer experience, and guide technical strategy. Mentor engineers and partner with product and engineering leadership to deliver scalable platform initiatives.

Lead the architecture and technical strategy for Affirm’s high-volume observability platform. Design telemetry pipelines and sampling strategies, improve reliability and cost efficiency, integrate observability into AI-assisted development, and drive platform adoption across engineering teams. Remain hands-on while mentoring six engineers, leading cross-functional initiatives, establishing engineering standards, and overseeing monitoring, alerting, on-call operations, and system availability.

Staff Software Engineer responsible for leading design and delivery of large-scale order platform capabilities spanning cloud and point-of-sale systems. The role drives architecture, performance, reliability, API design, code quality, incident response, and technical roadmap alignment. It also requires cross-team collaboration, domain expertise in order processing and synchronization, mentoring engineers, and using AI-assisted development tools to improve productivity.

Lead frontend technical strategy for Affirm’s checkout decision orchestration systems. Design and architect scalable web applications, guide major technical initiatives, improve reliability and operational processes, establish engineering quality standards, collaborate with product, design, and analytics, and mentor engineers. The role focuses on building fast, clear, and reliable checkout experiences using modern declarative UI frameworks.

Build and evolve backend payroll platform services and APIs used by multiple engineering teams. Own a core domain, ensuring correctness, scalability, reliability, performance, and observability. Lead architecture and design decisions, solve ambiguous technical problems independently, and partner with product and engineering teams on platform adoption. Collaborate cross-functionally to deliver compliant payroll capabilities while promoting responsible use of AI-assisted development tools.

Build customer-facing full-stack experiences for recommendations, nurture campaigns, booking flows, and plan upgrades. Design reliable backend APIs and data models, run experiments, improve conversion and retention, mentor engineers, and collaborate with Product, Design, Data, and Platform teams. The role requires ownership of complex, multi-quarter projects, scalable architecture, refactoring, performance, reliability, and responsible use of AI tools.

Lead organization-wide technical initiatives for Gusto’s API and AI agent platform. Design reliable, scalable API contracts and agent-facing tools, write clean Ruby on Rails code, mentor engineers, improve reliability and observability, engage developer customers, and troubleshoot production issues.

Own the architecture and delivery of scalable backend systems supporting growth across acquisition, activation, conversion, retention, and expansion. Design distributed systems, experimentation platforms, event-driven architectures, and data pipelines. Build intelligent decision systems and personalized journeys using customer and product signals. Lead ambiguous cross-functional initiatives, improve reliability and observability, mentor engineers, and uphold secure, compliant engineering standards.

Designs and deploys AI-powered features and scalable AI/ML services across SaaS products. Responsibilities include translating business problems into AI solutions, integrating large language models, preparing data, evaluating model performance, writing Python, building secure deployment infrastructure, and collaborating with product, data, and cloud operations teams. The role requires production AI/ML experience, scalable data infrastructure expertise, AWS familiarity, and modern DevOps practices.