Senior Staff Software Engineer

Summary

Join Wing, a Google company, as a Sr. Staff Software Engineer and become a technical mentor and architect for our drone delivery network. This remote US-based role (with occasional presence in Palo Alto) requires a benevolent meddler who can identify and solve complex systemic problems. You will integrate with engineering teams, drive strategic initiatives to improve reliability and efficiency, analyze systems for improvement opportunities, and create a strategic roadmap. The position also involves educating and upskilling the software organization, leading post-incident reviews, advocating for the engineering organization, and championing a collaborative culture. You will represent Wing's technical excellence internally and externally.

Requirements

• 15+ years of professional experience, including significant work in Software Engineering, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), and building large-scale distributed systems
• Expertise in designing, analyzing, and troubleshooting complex, large-scale distributed systems
• A deep and practical understanding of modern reliability principles, including incident management, post-mortem culture, SLO/SLI development
• Demonstrated ability to drive strategic technical decisions across large organizations
• Proven experience as an educator and mentor, with a passion for teaching and developing processes and technical curriculum for other engineers
• High emotional intelligence and empathy to earn the trust of engineering teams
• Mature data analysis skills to make informed decisions on technical strategy and investment
• Exceptional communication and influencing skills, with the ability to earn trust and work horizontally across a large engineering organization to drive change

Responsibilities

• Integrate deeply with our engineering teams by rolling up your sleeves to help debug complex issues, participate in design sessions, and understand our production systems firsthand. You will earn the trust and respect of the organization to effectively lead and influence change from within
• Drive strategic initiatives and process development to increase the reliability, quality, and efficiency of the Wing delivery network, ensuring our software architecture can scale with the business
• Analyze and review system designs, architecture, production systems, and team practices to uncover systemic issues and opportunities for improvement across Wing’s software
• Synthesize these findings into a clear vision, creating and owning foundational Software Engineering Principles in addition to a strategic roadmap for increasing reliability, and observability
• Educate and upskill the entire software organization by establishing formal curriculum and processes, developing new training materials, and personally mentoring engineers on software design and production excellence
• Lead our post-incident reviews, acting as a key escalation point for major outages and driving the decisions and follow-through that prevent future failures
• Advocate for the engineering organization by using your data-driven insights and hands-on findings to influence technical direction and investment at the leadership level
• Champion a collaborative engineering culture where learning from one another is paramount, mentoring software engineering leaders and fostering an environment of continuous improvement
• Represent Wing’s technical excellence both internally and externally through involvement in recruiting, industry outreach, conference presentations and standards organizations

Benefits

$310,000 — $329,000 USD