Staff Software Engineer: Platform R&D
SolarWinds
Salary undisclosed
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Description
At SolarWinds, we’re a people-first company. Our purpose is to enrich the lives of the people we serve—including our employees, customers, shareholders, partners, and communities. Join us in our mission to help customers accelerate business transformation with simple, powerful, and secure solutions.
The ideal candidate thrives in an innovative, fast-paced environment and is collaborative, accountable, ready, and empathetic. We’re looking for individuals who believe they can accomplish more as a team and create lasting growth for themselves and others. We hire based on attitude, competency, and commitment. Solarians are ready to advance our world-class solutions in a fast-paced environment and accept the challenge to lead with purpose. If you’re looking to build your career with an exceptional team, you’ve come to the right place. Join SolarWinds and grow with us!
Job Overview
We are seeking a Staff Software Engineer to join our Platform R&D organization. In this role, you will help design, build, and evolve the core backend systems that power large-scale cloud services and data-intensive platform capabilities. You will work on distributed systems that ingest, process, store, and serve high-volume operational and telemetry data while helping ensure those systems are scalable, resilient, and cost-effective.
This is a hands-on technical leadership role for someone who enjoys solving complex engineering problems, raising the bar on architecture and operational excellence, and partnering across teams to deliver foundational platform capabilities used broadly across the business.
Key Responsibilities
- Design and implement distributed backend systems that support high-throughput, low-latency data and service workloads
- Lead architecture and technical direction for services involved in data ingestion, transformation, storage, and serving
- Build and improve real-time and near-real-time data pipelines for large-scale platform use cases
- Drive system reliability, scalability, and operability through strong design, observability, and automation practicesPartner with peer engineering teams to define interfaces, evolve schemas, and support safe integration patterns across services
- Improve system performance across storage, compute, messaging, caching, and API layers
- Establish sound approaches for fault tolerance, failure recovery, rollout safety, and capacity planning
- Contribute to technical strategy and execution for platform modernization and backend architecture evolution
- Mentor senior and mid-level engineers and raise engineering standards through design reviews, code reviews, and operational leadership
- Participate in incident response and post-incident improvement work, with a focus on durable fixes and stronger platform foundations
Required Qualifications
- 8+ years of software engineering experience, with significant experience building and operating production backend systems at scale
- Strong experience designing distributed systems and understanding trade-offs around consistency, availability, durability, and performance
- Experience building data-intensive applications or platform services involving event-driven or streaming architectures
- Strong programming skills in one or more modern languages such as Rust, Go, Java, Python, or similar
- Experience with cloud-native infrastructure and containerized environments
- Experience with APIs, service-to-service communication patterns, and scalable data storage systems
- Strong debugging and performance tuning skills across complex, multi-service systems
- Demonstrated ability to lead technically across team boundaries and influence architecture without relying solely on authority
- Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to explain technical trade-offs clearly
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience with observability, telemetry, or large-scale data platform architectures
- Experience with stream processing, message brokers, and asynchronous system design
- Experience with distributed databases, analytical data stores, or high-scale storage systems
- Familiarity with Kubernetes and modern cloud platform operations
- Experience designing systems that balance reliability, cost efficiency, and developer velocity
- Experience building internal platform capabilities used by multiple product or engineering teams
- Experience with schema evolution, metadata management, or data modeling in distributed systems
- Experience leading cross-functional technical initiatives from design through rollout
SolarWinds is an Equal Employment Opportunity Employer. SolarWinds will consider all qualified applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, age, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status, disability, veteran status or any other characteristic protected by law.
All applications are treated in accordance with the SolarWinds Privacy Notice: https://www.solarwinds.com/applicant-privacy-notice
About this role
SolarWinds is building the backend infrastructure that powers its cloud platform, and they're looking for a Staff Software Engineer to own significant pieces of that foundation. You'd be designing and implementing distributed systems that handle massive volumes of operational and telemetry data—working across data ingestion, transformation, storage, and serving layers. This is hands-on technical leadership: you'll solve complex engineering problems around scalability, reliability, and cost-efficiency while setting architectural direction for how services integrate and evolve.
The role demands deep expertise in distributed systems and production backend work at scale. You'll need 8+ years of software engineering experience, strong skills in languages like Rust, Go, Java, or Python, and real familiarity with cloud-native infrastructure, APIs, and data storage patterns. Beyond individual contribution, you're expected to mentor other senior engineers, drive architecture decisions across team boundaries, and lead the technical strategy around platform modernization.
This position suits someone who enjoys both the technical depth of complex systems work and the leadership aspect of raising engineering standards. You'd be based in Austin and working in-office, partnering closely with peer teams to define how the platform evolves. If you're energized by incident response, performance tuning across multiple service layers, and building the kind of foundational infrastructure that other teams depend on, this is worth a close look.
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