Staff Software Engineer - Platform

Staff Software Engineer – Platform About this RoleAs our Staff Software Engineer – Platform, you will set architectural direction and serve as a senior technical leader across our Infrastructure, Shared Services, and Publishing groups. You will get to shape foundational systems (APIs, Eventing, CMS, DAM, Search, Authentication, Payment Processing), drive cross-cutting capabilities, and partner with Product and Design to influence roadmaps — all while staying hands-on and shipping code. To be successful, you will need principal-caliber scope and judgment, strong opinions on performance and developer experience, and a genuine openness to BibleProject's content and paradigm for approaching the Bible. Your home squad is Shared Services, where you will serve as Lead Engineer — a role, not a title. As Lead, you remain on-field writing code, coordinate technical direction within the Product Trio, and tighten decision loops, while people management stays with the Engineering Manager. Your influence, however, extends across the full Platform portfolio. Most importantly, you’ll be an integral part of maturing the product engineering culture of BibleProject, setting and maintaining a high bar with regards to our standards and people and working to create an environment where great technical professionals like yourself can ship work worthy of our mission at a sustainable pace that reflects the BibleProject values: generous, unified, thoughtful, creative, humble, and unhurried. What You'll Be Doing Core Responsibilities: LeadershipSet technical direction and long-term architectural vision across the Platform portfolio; drive clarity on system boundaries, data contracts, API strategy, and success metrics.Lead cross-functional technical discussions; align Product, Design, and Engineering on scope, trade-offs, and timelines; document decisions and rationale.Partner with the Group Product Manager, Engineering Managers, and Director of Engineering to shape roadmaps, anticipate risks, surface unknowns early, and propose mitigation paths.Mentor and uplevel engineers through design guidance, reviews, pairing, and structured feedback; foster a culture of learning and agility.Establish and evangelize engineering standards (testing strategy, performance, accessibility, security, reliability) and ensure consistent application.Participate in biweekly planning and execution rhythms as a technical leader and thought partner; help sequence work for incremental delivery.When serving as Lead Engineer for the Shared Services squad:Act as a peer leader within the trio; keep feedback windows small, bias toward action, and optimize mean time to decision — escalating only when org-level alignment is required.Coordinate the squad's technical plan within broader engineering standards; communicate decisions transparently and invite guidance.Provide timely, specific feedback to teammates and proactive upward feedback to the Engineering Manager on team health, risks, and technical debt.Lead by example through high-quality code contributions and thoughtful reviews.ResponsibilityLead design and delivery of complex, multi-service features; write tests and documentation; ship changes through CI/CD with high reliability.Own the health of critical services and domains: define SLOs/SLIs, proactively monitor, triage issues, lead post-incident reviews, and participate in on-call.Drive platform strategy for shared concerns: authentication, authorization, content delivery, API gateways, and developer tooling.Collaborate with DevOps to evolve CI/CD workflows and infrastructure; drive automation and improve developer experience.Raise code quality through systematic refactoring, dependency upgrades, and targeted migrations — balancing near-term delivery with long-term maintainability.ExpertiseRecognized expert across the platform's primary stack; apply patterns that yield reliable, maintainable systems at scale.Define API strategy and design/implement services (including GraphQL) that model clear contracts and enable product agility.Demonstrate deep experience with distributed systems and monorepo architecture in production; select patterns (idempotency, caching, retries, back-pressure) to improve resilience and performance.Work effectively in cloud-native environments (AWS, Docker, Kubernetes) to build, deploy, troubleshoot, and operate services; guide others in effective usage.Use observability tools (logs, metrics, traces) to verify behavior, diagnose complex issues, and inform proactive improvements.Evaluate and introduce emerging technologies with sound judgment; balance innovation with stability and operational readiness.What We're Looking For12+ years of development experience on a product team, with repeated impact delivering complex, cross-team projects.Demonstrated ability to set architectural direction across multiple teams and domains; track record of leading design and execution for multi-service features, platform capabilities, and large-scal