Senior Staff Software Engineer, Platform

• Set technical direction for platform initiatives spanning multiple teams, connecting architectural decisions to product needs and business priorities.

• Identify and lead changes addressing system bottlenecks, reliability risks, and architectural constraints.

• Own cross-team initiatives from problem definition and design through implementation, rollout, and evaluation.

• Make tradeoffs across reliability, performance, cost, operational complexity, and delivery speed.

• Stay hands-on where your contribution matters most, writing code, building prototypes, and helping teams resolve difficult implementation problems.

• Partner with engineering and product leaders to prioritize platform investments and sequence work across teams.

• Guide major architectural decisions and help teams resolve disagreements with clear reasoning and evidence.

• Mentor senior and staff engineers, strengthening their technical judgment and ability to lead across team boundaries.

• You bring structure to ambiguous problems and help teams agree on what to solve first.

• You pair architectural judgment with hands-on engineering and ownership through delivery.

• You build alignment across teams, challenge assumptions, and make decisions when priorities compete.

• You favor simple, maintainable designs and understand when added complexity is necessary.

• Proven experience setting technical direction across multiple engineering teams, aligning engineering and product leaders on architectural decisions, priorities, and tradeoffs.

• Track record of leading complex, cross-team initiatives from problem definition through production delivery, with measurable improvements in reliability, scalability, performance, or engineering productivity.

• 12+ years of software engineering experience, including substantial hands-on experience architecting, building, and operating large-scale distributed systems.

• Deep experience designing and operating production systems in cloud environments such as AWS or GCP, with ownership of architectural decisions and their operational outcomes.

• Strong hands-on software engineering skills, including writing production code and building prototypes to validate architectural approaches.

• Deep expertise in one or more of the following areas, with working knowledge across others:
• Cloud infrastructure, container orchestration, and infrastructure as code, such as Kubernetes and Terraform.

• Event streaming and real-time processing systems, such as Kafka, Flink, or Beam.

• Distributed storage and data systems, including OLAP/OLTP databases, blob storage, and caching.

• Ability to explain complex technical tradeoffs, build alignment across teams and senior leadership, and resolve architectural disagreements.

• Experience mentoring senior and staff engineers, strengthening their architectural judgment, and developing technical leadership across teams.

The base salary range Sentry reasonably expects to pay for this position is $260,000 to $400,000, plus an annual performance bonus of up to 20% of base salary. A successful candidate's actual base salary (or hourly wage) amount will be determined by a variety of relevant factors including, without limitation, the candidate's work location, education, work and other relevant experience, skills, and job-related knowledge. A successful candidate will be eligible to participate in Sentry's employee benefit plans/programs applicable to the candidate's position (including incentive compensation, equity grants, paid time off, and group health insurance coverage). See Sentry Benefits for more details about the Company's benefit plans/programs.