Staff Software Engineer

🤖 Staff Software Engineer

About Standard Bots

Standard Bot’s mission is to significantly lower the barrier to entry to real-world automation, bringing the power of bits to the world of atoms and unlocking productivity for entire new industries and users. Our user-facing applications and APIs directly empower individuals and developers to jump directly into solving their challenges without the need for a background in robotics or automation. A relentless focus on simplicity and ease of use brings this revolutionary potential to new users and industries.

🚀 The Opportunity: Driving Systemic Impact and Technical Strategy

We are looking for an exceptional Staff Software Engineer to serve as a technical force multiplier across the organization. This role focuses on tackling the most ambiguous, complex, and high-leverage engineering challenges that span multiple teams and domains.

Your impact will be measured not just by the code you write, but by your ability to define the future state of our systems, drive massive, cross-cutting projects to completion, and significantly elevate the technical capabilities and standards of the entire engineering department.

What You'll Do

🏗️ Strategic Architecture & Long-Term Vision

• Define the Future: Own the long-term technical vision and strategy for major components of our platform, anticipating future scale, security, and product needs a year or more out.

• Decouple and Scale: Design and champion new system architectures that focus on clear, stable interfaces and domain decoupling to accelerate the velocity of multiple feature teams.

• Standard Setter: Establish and improve engineering excellence standards, including best practices for code quality, documentation, and the non-functional requirements (performance, reliability) that systems must meet.

🏎️ Complex Project Leadership & Execution

• Drive Multi-Team Programs: Proactively identify, define, and lead complex, ambiguous, and high-risk technical programs (e.g., major platform refactors, organizational-level reliability efforts) that require coordination across 2-3 engineering teams.

• Pragmatic Trade-Offs: Cut through organizational and technical complexity, making clear, pragmatic technical trade-offs that balance long-term vision with timely delivery against business goals.

• Hands-on Delivery: Deliver technically deep, cross-cutting software solutions, primarily focusing on back-end systems but maintaining the necessary full-stack perspective to drive end-to-end integration.

🛠️ Production Excellence & Organizational Leverage

• Systemic Reliability: Drive deep-dive root cause analyses (RCA) for critical, cross-domain production issues, transforming immediate crises into concrete, prioritized engineering work that prevents recurrence across the fleet.

• Technical Multiplier: Mentor and coach Senior and Mid-Level engineers across the organization, significantly contributing to their technical growth and thereby increasing the overall efficiency and quality of the engineering department.

• Influence & Accountability: Reliably improve and hold others accountable for a higher quality standard (e.g., reliability, performance, security) across the entire software team.

Who You Are

We are looking for a highly self-driven, resourceful, and technically deep engineer who can operate with complete independence across domains.

Skills You’ll Bring

• Experience: 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, including a proven track record of successfully leading large-scale, complex projects that span multiple engineering teams. At least 1 year of experience as a staff engineer in a large software organization.

• System Design: Deep expertise in architecting, developing, and operating distributed, highly-reliable, and scalable systems.

• Cross-Functional Influence: Proven ability to influence technical direction without direct authority and successfully partner with product management, hardware engineering, and executive leadership.

• Clarity of Communication: Exceptional written and verbal communication skills, capable of synthesizing complex technical risks and strategies for non-technical leadership.

• Proactive Simplicity: A relentless drive to reduce complexity, improve operational simplicity, and proactively identify organizational-level technical risks and address them before they become crises.

• Tech Stack Expertise: Fluency in our core stack is preferred (React, Typescript, Node.js, Python, C++, Kubernetes).

📍 Location and Benefits

This role will start remote but within the next few quarters, it will become hybrid ~3 days/week onsite in our Seattle office. The office will be centrally located and will be fully equipped with robots for demos and testing!

Office & Workplace Perks

• Direct Access to Robotics: Work alongside our physical products with dedicated demo and testing cells, allowing you to validate your work on real robots daily.

• Collaborative & Modern Space: Enjoy open collaborative spaces for team problem-solving and focus zones for deep work.

• Customizable Workstations: We provide ergonomic and customizable setups to ensure a comfortable and productive work environment.

• Amenities: Daily catered lunch, fully stocked kitchens with snacks and beverages, and regular team events.

Compensation and Financial Benefits

The salary range for this role is $210,000 to $300,000, depending on experience. Base salary is just one part of the overall compensation at Standard Bots. All Full-Time Employees are eligible for Employee Stock Options. We also offer a package of benefits including paid time off, medical/dental/vision insurance, life insurance, disability insurance, and 401(k) to regular full-time employees.