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Kontakt.io

Open 15d

Staff Software Engineer

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We're hiring a Staff Software Engineer to be a technical anchor for one of our product teams — someone who can look at an ambiguous, gnarly problem and turn it into a system other engineers want to build on. This isn't a "senior-plus-more-years" role. You'll set technical direction, make build-vs-buy and architecture calls that outlast any single sprint, and raise the engineering bar for everyone around you — while still writing production code yourself.

Our product spans several interdependent teams, so things rarely stay inside a clean box. You'll need to be someone who's energized by that complexity rather than frustrated by it — who notices a gap between two systems (or two teams) before it becomes an incident, and picks it up because it's the right thing to do, not because it landed on your plate.

  • 7+ years of engineering experience (Java/Kotlin), including time spent as a technical lead or de facto architect on a team
  • Deep comfort with both OOP and functional paradigms, and the judgment to know when each is the right tool
  • Proven experience architecting and operating container-based, distributed systems in production
  • Genuine fluency with AI-assisted development tools — you've integrated them into how you actually build, debug, and design, not just experimented with them once
  • A restless curiosity — you notice broken or missing things even when nobody assigned them to you, and you go fix them
  • Comfort operating in a system with lots of moving parts and cross-team dependencies, without needing everything to be perfectly scoped before you act
  • A track record of making other engineers better — through code review, design docs, or direct mentorship

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