[Remote] Staff Engineer

Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Thorn is a nonprofit technology organization focused on defending children from sexual exploitation and abuse. The Staff Engineer will lead high-impact initiatives for the Safer product area, designing, building, scaling, and maintaining backend services, APIs, and high-volume data-processing systems. The role partners across Product and Engineering, provides technical leadership, and improves system reliability, performance, and sustainability.

Responsibilities

• Collaborate with engineers across multiple areas of ownership to build and maintain scalable systems and applications from end-to-end
• Take on large, complex initiatives independently. You identify unknowns, gather input from teammates, break down ambiguous problems, and communicate progress clearly to stakeholders
• Lead technical discussions across teams, partnering closely with Build and Product to define requirements and arrive together at practical, high-quality approaches
• Develop solutions to problems faced by our users, clearly articulating tradeoffs and decisions to stakeholders across technical and non-technical audiences, and incorporating feedback into iterative improvements
• Take ownership of architectural direction, making sound implementation decisions that strengthen system reliability, scalability, and sustainability over the long term
• Play a critical role in day-to-day coding, code reviews, and troubleshooting production issues, including participating in on-call rotations to support system reliability and incident response
• Anticipate technical risks and proactively address them, including identifying and prioritizing technical debt before it becomes a larger constraint
• Strengthen teams by sharing expertise, offering thoughtful feedback, mentoring teammates within your domain, and stepping in to help when needed, even outside your primary area of expertise
• Drive technical innovation by researching and deliberately incorporating new tools, technologies, or patterns where they meaningfully improve our products and workflows

Skills

• You have a commitment to putting the children we serve at the center of everything you do
• You have substantial experience building and operating backend services in production, including experience with Python
• You have hands-on experience deploying or supporting production applications in Kubernetes. You can work with common Kubernetes resources and troubleshoot application-level issues; deep cluster or platform expertise is not required
• You have experience building and operating services in a production cloud environment
• You are comfortable contributing across unfamiliar parts of a codebase or technical domain, learning quickly and adapting as the team's priorities change. You consider the impact of your decisions within your team and Thorn as a whole
• You demonstrate strong architectural judgment and consider the broader system impact of your decisions
• You are nimble and comfortable operating in ambiguous problem spaces and bringing clarity to complex technical challenges as requirements evolve
• You act with autonomy and demonstrate sound judgment in knowing when to seek input from others
• You make pragmatic technical tradeoffs, deliver useful increments quickly, and balance immediate needs with long-term maintainability and system health
• You influence technical decisions through clear articulation of tradeoffs and thoughtful collaboration
• You elevate the engineers around you through mentorship, feedback, and shared technical standards, and remain open to learning from your teammates
• You can demonstrate empathy and advocate for our users, while balancing product vision and engineering constraints
• You communicate clearly, efficiently, and thoughtfully. We're a highly-distributed team, and effective written communication is crucial for everything from Slack to code reviews
• Building, scaling, and monitoring high-volume systems or data-processing pipelines
• Building software, platforms, APIs, or tooling for other developers
• Experience with AWS, Terraform, PostgreSQL, or Elasticsearch

Benefits

• Remote-first work model structured around working from home most of the time
• Employees are offered a broad range of benefits

Company Overview