Senior or Staff Software Engineer

The Senior or Staff Software Engineer drives the design and evolution of Sovrn’s most complex, high-impact software systems. You’ll operate across domains spanning architecture, application performance, extensibility, and compliance to deliver solutions that scale and endure.

You’ll balance big-picture architectural strategy with hands-on technical leadership, mentoring engineers, influencing standards, and ensuring Sovrn’s software systems are secure, performant, and adaptable for the future. You think holistically about user experience, system resilience, and long-term maintainability and you raise the bar for engineering excellence across the organization.

What You’ll Be Doing:

• Designing and Architecting Scalable Systems: Lead the design of distributed systems that integrate multiple components and services across Sovrn’s product ecosystem.
• Driving Technical Excellence: Define best practices for system design, testability, documentation, and accessibility to ensure applications are secure, performant, and user-centric.
• Leveraging AI and Automation: Use advanced development tools and AI to deliver secure, extensible, and efficient solutions that reduce dependencies and technical overhead.
• Shaping Engineering Standards: Establish and maintain SLOs/SLAs, coding and documentation standards, and architectural guidelines across teams.
• Mentoring and Influencing: Coach engineers at all levels, building organizational capability in system thinking, collaboration, and architectural decision-making.
• Aligning Technical Strategy: Partner cross-functionally with Product, Design, and Cloud Engineering to ensure architectural decisions align with Sovrn’s business strategy and growth goals.

• Deep expertise in scalable architecture, with proven experience designing and evolving distributed, multi-service systems.
• Strong focus on performance, security, and compliance, with experience meeting SOC, ISO, and GDPR standards.
• Advanced proficiency in automation and infrastructure, including Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, CloudFormation) and scripting (Python, Bash, or Go).
• Strategic systems thinking, with the ability to anticipate future challenges and architect adaptable solutions.
• Exceptional communication and leadership, capable of aligning executives, engineers, and cross-functional teams on complex technical initiatives.
• A legacy of mentorship and impact, building technical acumen, shaping team culture, and developing engineers into stronger system thinkers and leaders.

We understand that no candidate is perfectly qualified for any job. Experience comes in different forms, many skills are transferable, and passion goes a long way. Even more important than your resume is a clear demonstration of accountability and the ability to thrive in a fluid and collaborative environment. We expect you to learn new things in this role and encourage you to apply if your experience is close to what we’re looking for.

Compensation and Benefits: The base salary for a Senior position is $150,000 to $175,000 and the staff-level position is $170,000 to $200,000. Actual base salary will depend on the candidate’s education, experience, skills, and location. In addition to salary, the total compensation package includes bonus and equity. Sovrn offers a full slate of benefits from medical, dental, and vision coverage, short and long-term disability, life insurance, paid parental leave, 401(k) plan and match, 11 paid holidays, flexible vacation, and commuter benefits.

Every interesting company solves important problems for other people. Sovrn is a Software and Data business that helps Open Web businesses be and remain independent. We help them understand their business better, operate more efficiently, and make & keep more money.

• We believe in the freedom and free-flow of information.
• We believe the Open Web is the largest source of this information.
• We believe in helping Open Web businesses be and remain Independent.

Through Software products and Data solutions we help our customers:

• Understand their business better, so they can make better decisions
• Operate their business more efficiently, so they can invest in what matters most
• Make (and Keep) more money, so they control their own destiny

Languages/components/tools in our stack: Java, Kafka (Redpanda), AWS, Databricks, Datadog, ONNX.