Staff Software Engineer (Builders)

• As a Staff Engineer on our Builders, you’ll be the technical anchor of a team that handles EvenUp’s highest-priority customer issues — reporting directly into the CPO’s org
• You’ll lead the most complex investigations, drive architectural improvements that eliminate entire classes of problems, and serve as a technical bridge between the Builders and the rest of engineering
• This role is not about being the best firefighter — it’s about making sure we need fewer firefighters over time
• You’ll set the technical direction for how EvenUp handles escalations at scale: the tooling, the patterns, the standards
• And when the hardest problems land, you’ll be the one who digs in
• The squad operates without a dedicated PM
• That’s intentional — we want engineers who think like product owners
• As the most senior IC on the team, you’ll set the bar for what that looks like: understanding customer needs deeply, making principled decisions about what to build and what to defer, and influencing the product roadmap based on what you’re seeing in escalations
• Lead technical resolution of the most complex, multi-system escalations — the ones that require deep cross-functional understanding and careful architectural thinking
• Identify systemic weaknesses across the product that generate escalations and partner with other engineering teams to address them at the root
• Define and drive the technical strategy for the squad: observability, tooling, runbooks, incident response patterns, and reliability standards
• Partner closely with the CPO and EM to shape the squad’s roadmap, balancing urgent reactive work with high-leverage proactive investments
• Serve as a technical advisor and force multiplier for other engineers on the squad — reviewing approaches, accelerating investigations, and raising the ceiling on what the team can handle
• Influence engineering culture and practices across EvenUp: blameless post-mortems, on-call hygiene, failure mode documentation
• Act as a product thinker for the squad — synthesizing patterns from escalations into product insights, shaping what the team builds proactively, and making sound scope decisions without PM support
• Engage directly with key customers or CS leadership when escalations require deep technical credibility at the table

Benefits

• Flexible working hours to match your style
• Offsites - get to meet your coworkers on a fully-expenses trip ever 6-12 months
• A variety of virtual team events such as game nights & happy hours
• Choice of medical, dental, and vision insurance plans for you and your family
• Flexible paid time off and 10+ holidays per year
• A stipend to upgrade your home office for fully-remote roles
• 401k for US-based employees

• Exceptional diagnostic and systems-thinking skills — you can hold the complexity of a multi-service architecture in your head and find the failure point others miss
• Deeply product-minded: you understand the “why” behind customer pain, not just the “what,” and you’re as comfortable making product decisions as you are architectural ones
• Experience at a high-growth SaaS company navigating rapid product evolution
• 8+ years of software engineering experience, with a demonstrated track record at the Staff level or equivalent
• A bias toward permanent fixes over repeated patches — you’ve built things that made whole categories of problems go away
• Deep technical credibility: you can write and review code, design systems, and make sound architectural trade-offs under time pressure
• Experience driving improvements across team boundaries — you influence without authority and get other teams to own their part of the fix
• Strong communication skills with engineers, product leaders, and non-technical stakeholders
• Prior background in incident command or escalation management frameworks
• Deep familiarity with AI/ML product systems and the failure modes they introduce (data quality, model drift, pipeline failures, etc.)
• Experience working in regulated industries or with enterprise customers who have high SLA expectations
• Experience building or leading reliability engineering, SRE, or platform functions at a growing company