Staff Software Engineer | Platform Team

We’re seeking a skilled Staff Platform Engineer to join our team! 

The Platform team builds the foundation every engineer at Machinify works on top of. Our scope is unusually broad: developer tooling and shared standards, observability and resilience engineering, core product server systems, and a growing Rust framework for building correct services fast. We lead AI tool adoption across the entire company. This is a staff-level IC role — you'll have real influence over technical direction without managing people. 

We're honest about the challenge. We inherited complex and important Scala systems that need scaling work and data layer rethinking. Some of the work is untangling implementation issues so the real architectural problems become visible. If you're the kind of engineer who finds that satisfying — seeing through symptoms to root causes, making hard systems better — this is your team. 

We have strong opinions about how engineering should work. Emotional safety matters. We lead with empathy for our users and our colleagues. We own the whole problem, not just the interesting parts. We build it right, test it thoroughly, and leave things better than we found them. We operate with high trust and high autonomy, and we're looking for people who thrive in that environment. 

Does this sound like the right opportunity to explore?... Lets connect! 

What You’ll Do

Some or all of the following: 

• Dig into inherited Scala systems to find where the real problems are, separate symptoms from causes, and make them scale 
• Redesign the data layer our ML and AI products depend on — this is an open, hard problem 
• Build out a Rust framework that lets teams ship correct, performant services without reinventing fundamentals 
• Improve observability and resilience across the platform so we find problems before our customers do 
• Shape developer tooling and engineering standards — your work multiplies everyone else's effectiveness 
• Drive AI tool adoption across the company, figuring out what actually helps engineers work better 
• Work across the full stack: JVM (Java/Scala), Rust, Python, SQL, and Spark 

What You Bring

What matters most: 

• Systems thinking. You see how pieces connect. When something breaks, you reason about the whole system, not just the component in front of you. 
• Fearless code reading. You can drop into a large, unfamiliar codebase, build a mental model, and figure out what needs to change. 
• Empathy for users. Whether it's a developer using your framework or an operator reading your error messages, you design for the people downstream. 
• Testing discipline. You test thoroughly not because someone requires it, but because you've shipped enough software to know what happens when you don't. 
• Comfort with ambiguity. Our hardest problems don't come with specifications. You're energized, not paralyzed, by that. 

Technical skills  

• Proficiency in JVM ecosystem (Java, Scala) 
• Experience with Rust highly desired 
• Python 
• SQL and data processing (Spark or similar) 
• Distributed systems design 
• Observability and resilience engineering 

The salary for this position is based on an array of factors unique to each candidate: Such as years and depth of experience, set skills, certifications, etc.  We are hiring for different levels, and our Recruiting team will let you know if you qualify for a different role/range. Salary is one component of the total compensation package, which includes meaningful equity, excellent healthcare, flexible time off, and other benefits and perks. 

Pay range: $220,000-245,000