[Hiring] Staff Software Engineer @American IT Systems

Role Description

We are looking for a Staff Software Engineer with 5-8 years of experience to join our team and take on technical leadership for key projects. We're seeking a curious, proactive individual who can map their strong technical skills to business needs and drive impact across the organization. This role is critical for us to expand our engineering capacity, allowing us to tackle a whole new category of work and innovate on our enterprise tech stack.

• Lead projects end-to-end, taking ownership from conception to deployment while collaborating closely with product managers.
• Design and build scalable systems, working with large datasets and a broad service-oriented architecture.
• Contribute to system-level design and architectural decisions, innovating on our tech stack.
• Mentor other engineers through technical leadership and collaboration.
• Build and scale high-performing, full-stack applications using Python/Django on the backend and React on the frontend.

Qualifications

• 5 - 9 years of experience in full-stack software engineering, with a focus on Python/Django and React.
• Experience working with large, complex data sets.
• Demonstrated career progression and increasing responsibility (i.e., high slope).
• Experience at a Series B or similar stage startup.

Requirements

• Strong expertise in Python/Django for backend services.
• Strong expertise in modern React for frontend UIs.
• Experience with system design for large-scale infrastructure.

Traits to Avoid

• Candidates with multiple short tenures (less than 18 months).
• Candidates from large, late-stage public tech companies.
• Candidates with more than 10 years of experience.

What to Ask Candidates

• Tell me about a time you took initiative on a project that went beyond your defined role. What was the situation, what actions did you take, and what was the outcome?
• Describe a large-scale system you've worked on. What were the key architectural challenges, and how did you contribute to its design and scalability?
• What is their salary expectation?
• How actively is this candidate exploring new opportunities?

Ideal Companies & Backgrounds

• High-growth Series B/C SaaS companies known for strong engineering culture and velocity: "Ramp", "Brex", "Vanta", "Airtable", "Notion", "Deel", "Gusto", "Plaid", "Rippling".
• Companies with strong data engineering practices and experience with large datasets: "Databricks", "Snowflake", "Palantir Technologies", "Fivetran", "dbt Labs", "Confluent", "Amplitude", "Mixpanel".
• Early-stage startups where engineers have a 'founder mentality' and high ownership: "Glean", "Retool", "Scale AI", "Anthropic", "Hugging Face", "Census", "Hexaware Technologies".
• Companies with strong data and workflow automation platforms: "Zapier", "Workato", "Celonis", "UiPath", "MuleSoft", "Segment", "Fivetran", "dbt Labs".

Interview Process

• Hiring Manager Screen with Yilmaz Oztanir, Hiring Manager.
• Take-home challenge (90 min): A 90-minute task to build a full stack system, allowing candidates to use AI tools.
• Three live coding sessions (1 hr each, total 3 hrs): Each session will cover troubleshooting, technical problem solving, and system design/architecture capabilities.
• [Optional] Cross-functional interview with a product manager to assess communication and cross-functional collaboration.
• Final interview with Jeremy, CTO.

Benefits

• Medical, dental, and vision insurance.
• 401k match with immediate vesting.
• Vacation, holidays, sick leave, and generous parental leave.
• Remote-friendly (flexible across all US time zones).
• Happy hours and company retreats.