Staff Software Engineer, Core Architecture

We’re seeking a Staff Engineer to join our Core Architecture Team, a small, senior group of engineers responsible for solving the hardest technical problems across the platform.

This is a deeply hands-on role. You will spend a significant portion of your time designing, building, and shipping production code in the most critical parts of our system, while also providing architectural leadership across teams. This is not an ivory-tower architect position - success in this role requires comfort operating directly in complex codebases, debugging real production issues, and owning end-to-end execution of high-risk technical initiatives.

You’ll work on initiatives such as:

• Safely decomposing our monolithic backend, writing and owning the new systems that replace it
• Redesigning distributed authentication and authorization systems, including implementation and rollout
• Architecting and building for 100× platform scale, with hands-on ownership of performance, reliability, and cost
• Building an AI-powered “Software Factory” - a multi-agent system that takes engineering tasks from ticket to PR, orchestrated via Temporal, Slack, and sandboxed Kubernetes dev environments
• Pioneering practical AI-assisted development - dynamic tool curation, multi-channel human-in-the-loop workflows, and “fast-fail” guardrails that know when to hand back to a human
• Setting technical direction by doing the work, not just reviewing it
• Driving engineering standards, tooling, and fundamentals across teams
• Mentoring technical leaders and influencing the engineering direction of the company

What You’ll Do

Hands-On Engineering

• Design, implement, and maintain core backend systems that are foundational to the platform
• Write production code in high-impact areas, including services, shared libraries, infrastructure, and tooling
• Define the security boundary for autonomous agents - user identity propagation, task-scoped tool access via a centralized Tool Shed, and sandboxing to limit blast radius
• Lead the execution of technically complex projects end-to-end, from design through rollout and iteration
• Debug and resolve hard production problems involving scale, data consistency, performance, and reliability

Architecture & Technical Leadership

• Drive architectural decisions through prototypes, code, and real implementations, not just diagrams
• Establish patterns and best practices for service boundaries, APIs, data ownership, and distributed systems
• Partner with engineering teams to guide major refactors and platform migrations
• Make pragmatic technical trade-offs that balance velocity, quality, and long-term maintainability

Execution at Scale

• Partner with product, engineering, and platform teams to execute technically complex projects
• Make high-leverage architectural decisions under uncertainty, with clear trade-offs
• Turn vague problems into clear technical strategies and execution plans

Mentorship & Influence

• Raise the technical bar through deep code reviews, design discussions, and hands-on collaboration
• Mentor senior engineers and help grow future technical leaders
• Influence engineering direction by being a trusted technical partner who ships high-quality systems

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience at high-growth startups or large scale platforms
• Demonstrated experience leading architectural design for large, distributed systems
• Experience breaking down monoliths into service-oriented architectures or microservices
• Deep expertise in scaling backend systems to handle high throughput and complex operational concerns
• Strong understanding of auth systems, security boundary design, and distributed identity
• Clear decision-making in ambiguous technical situations
• Excellent communicator - able to articulate trade-offs to engineers and cross-functional partners

Nice to Have

• Experience with TypeScript, Node.js, AWS, MongoDB, Postgres (our main stack)
• Experience building or owning engineering standards and platform foundations
• Previous roles as a principal, staff, or distinguished engineer

Pulled from the full job description

• Health insurance
• Unlimited paid time off, * The estimated starting base salary range for this role is $220K-240K depending on level, location and experience, plus a generous pre-IPO equity package
• Other benefits include comprehensive health coverage, work from anywhere (remote-first workplace), unlimited PTO - plus extra fun perks!

Owner is the AI-native system local business owners use to succeed, starting with restaurants.

We’re building the system that replaces the many tools owners use to run their business.

It powers everything from the restaurant’s website, online ordering, CRM, POS, and more.

Product philosophy

Most small business software makes owners do the work to get what they want: sales growth and profit growth. Owner does the work for them agentically.

Our system drives demand, converts it, and helps operators run their business day to day. As it improves, the business improves with it.

Using Owner should feel like having a team of great operators, engineers, and marketers working for you.

Our vision

We’re starting by helping independent restaurants succeed online.

But it’s not just restaurants that need our help. Most local businesses are struggling with these same problems. Huge technology corporations are taking their customers, bleeding their profits, and making it hard for them to survive.

Once we nail the solution for restaurants - we’ll scale it into every other local business type.

In the future we envision, tens of millions of local business owners will use our technology to succeed in the digital age.

Our traction

Since 2020, we’ve generated tens of millions in revenue and processed over a billion dollars of online orders. 1 in 5 Americans have used an Owner.com website.

More importantly, we’ve helped over 20,000 restaurant owners, and saved them nearly $200 million in fees.

Our team

Our team is now in the low hundreds. We’ve got top talent from the most successful companies in SMB software, including: Shopify, HubSpot, DoorDash, ServiceTitan, Rappi, Faire and Stripe.

We’ll be scaling even faster in 2026 to keep pace with our customer growth.

Where we work

Owner is a remote-first, global company headquartered in San Francisco, with a sales hub in Toronto. For a few of our roles we prioritize in-person collaboration at one of our office locations. Most of our teammates are distributed throughout the globe. Please review the role description and discuss with your recruiter for more details on location!

Why we’re looking for you

We are looking for a mission-driven Staff engineer who is passionate about their craft and committed to building incredible products for our customers.

This role is 100% remote and can be based anywhere in the United States or Canada. For San Francisco-based candidates: we have a new HQ in the Presidio for optional in-person collaboration opportunities!

Our Tech Stack

• Frontend: [React, Next.js, Vue]
• Backend: [Node.js, Mongo]
• Typescript everywhere