Sr Staff Software Engineer

hackajob is collaborating with American Express to connect them with exceptional professionals for this role.

How will you make an impact in this role?

Joining Amex Tech means discovering and shaping your contribution to something big. Here, you can work alongside talented tech teams and build a unique career with the Powerful Backing of American Express. With a range of opportunities to work with the latest technologies, and a commitment to back the broader engineering community through open source, our mission is to power your success. Because Amex Tech is powered by our technology, our culture, and our colleagues.

We are looking for an experienced and highly motivated Staff Engineer to join our dynamic, self-led engineering team. In this role, you will provide technical leadership across multiple teams and domains, influencing architecture, mentoring engineers, and ensuring the delivery of scalable, high-quality systems that power our real-time expense management platform. This is a high-impact role suited for individuals who thrive on cross-functional collaboration, are comfortable with ambiguity, and can drive technical excellence at scale.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead the technical direction for complex projects and systems, ensuring scalability, maintainability, and reliability.
• Mentor engineers across multiple teams, guiding them through design reviews, code reviews, and career development.
• Collaborate with engineering leaders, product managers, and designers to shape product strategy and execution.
• Drive architectural decisions, propose and implement improvements to system performance, scalability, and developer productivity.
• Contribute to key system components across the stack—front end, back end, and infrastructure—based on priority and team need.
• Uphold and champion Center’s engineering best practices, including CI/CD (GitHub Actions), testing, observability, and version control (Trunk based).
• Partner with stakeholders to identify and resolve technical debt, improve code quality, and reduce operational overhead.
• Investigate and resolve complex technical and performance issues using monitoring tools such as Datadog.
  
  

Minimum Qualifications

• 8 years of professional experience in software engineering, with demonstrated impact in senior or staff-level roles.
• Deep expertise in at least one area of the stack (backend systems, frontend architecture, infrastructure) and solid working knowledge across the others.
• Proven experience designing and maintaining distributed, event-driven systems using Kafka, SQS, S3, Lambda, Step Functions, and other serverless technologies.
• Proficiency with modern Go, JavaScript/TypeScript, NextJS, and React.
• Experience with modern communication protocols such as tRPC, gRPC, and websockets.
• Strong understanding of SQL and relational databases, ideally with experience using CockroachDB.
• Experience with ECS and Kubernetes for deploying and scaling containerized applications.
• Experience with analytical databases such as ClickHouse or Tinybird.
• Strong testing mindset with experience in unit, integration, and end-to-end test development using Go Test, and related tools.
• Demonstrated ability to lead by influence and communicate complex technical concepts clearly across diverse stakeholders.
• Experience working in a fast-paced, high-accountability environment with a strong culture of ownership.
• Experience working in real-time financial or expense management applications.
• Familiarity with feature flagging and observability tools such as LaunchDarkly.
• Experience working at an enterprise-scale organization.
  
  

Seattle, WA, United States

Phoenix, AZ, United States

New York, NY, United States

WA, United States

Sunrise, FL, United States

(Hybrid)