Staff Software Engineer (Quality & Reliability Platform)

• BuildOps is looking for a Staff Software Engineer to set and drive our company-wide technical strategy for building, shipping, and operating reliable software
• This is a high-impact, cross-functional role for an engineer who sees quality and reliability as properties of the entire system—not as a final testing phase or the responsibility of a separate team
• You will work across engineering, product, infrastructure, and customer-facing organizations to identify systemic risks, establish architectural standards, and create platform capabilities that make safe, dependable delivery the default
• You will influence how teams design systems, validate changes, observe production behavior, manage risk, and learn from failures
• Your work will span architecture, developer tooling, release safety, observability, resilience, testability, and engineering practices
• The specific solutions will evolve as you identify the highest-leverage opportunities
• Product engineering teams at BuildOps own the quality and testing of their features
• Your role is not to test their work for them
• You will establish the technical direction, paved roads, systems, and standards that enable every team to deliver reliable software with greater confidence and speed
• Define and drive BuildOps’ technical strategy for engineering quality, production reliability, and safe software delivery
• Identify systemic sources of customer-impacting failures and lead cross-team initiatives that address root causes rather than individual symptoms
• Establish architectural principles, engineering standards, and paved roads that make reliable system design and safe delivery easier by default
• Partner with engineering teams during system and product design to improve resilience, operability, testability, and failure isolation before implementation begins
• Build or guide the development of shared platform capabilities for release safety, automated validation, production feedback, test data, environment management, and developer self-service
• Advance BuildOps’ observability strategy so teams can understand system behavior, detect regressions quickly, diagnose failures, and make informed reliability investments
• Improve how we validate interactions across services, data boundaries, financial workflows, and other business-critical systems
• Define meaningful measures of quality and reliability, then use them to identify priorities and demonstrate improvements in customer and engineering outcomes
• Lead technical programs that span multiple teams and organizations, aligning stakeholders and driving decisions without relying on direct authority
• Mentor engineers and technical leaders, raising the organization’s ability to reason about risk, reliability, and quality throughout the software lifecycle
• Evaluate BuildOps’ existing practices and technology objectively, evolving or replacing them when they no longer meet our needs
• What Success Looks Like:
• Success in this role is measured by durable improvements in outcomes, not by the number of alerts, dashboards, tests, or frameworks created. Examples include:
• Fewer customer-impacting defects and recurring classes of production failures
• Greater release confidence and a lower change-failure rate
• Faster detection, diagnosis, and recovery when failures occur
• Shorter, more reliable feedback loops for engineers making changes
• Clearer ownership and better visibility into the health of critical systems and workflows
• Increased engineering velocity without sacrificing safety or reliability
• Broad adoption of shared practices and platform capabilities without creating a centralized quality bottleneck

Benefits

• Financial: Competitive base salary. Generous equity options. Performance bonuses for 95%+ employees. Bi- annual performance & compensation reviews. RRSP & 401k employee contribution plan.
• Health & Family: Health/dental/vision insurance as of Day 1. Paid parental leave. Life insurance + disability insurance. Employee Family Assistance Program (EAP).
• Other Perks: Flexible PTO. Home-office allowance. Hybrid flexibility. Access to awesome office spaces (in L A , Toronto, and Raleigh). Team retreats & off- sites.

• A track record of leading multi-team initiatives that improved production reliability, software delivery, platform capabilities, or engineering effectiveness
• Strong systems thinking and the ability to connect architecture, data integrity, operational behavior, developer workflows, and customer impact
• Strong written and verbal communication, including the ability to explain technical risks, tradeoffs, and strategy to engineering, product, and business stakeholders
• Experience with several of the following: observability, resilience engineering, CI/CD, release safety, automated validation, developer platforms, testability, performance engineering, or incident learning
• Strong software design and programming skills in TypeScript, Java, or another relevant language
• Experience designing and operating distributed systems in a cloud environment such as AWS
• The ability to define useful engineering measures while avoiding metrics that reward activity without improving outcomes
• A practical approach that balances long-term direction with incremental improvements that deliver value quickly
• Demonstrated success influencing architecture and engineering practices across teams that do not report to you
• Significant software engineering experience, including operating at Staff or equivalent scope on ambiguous, cross-cutting technical problems
• You care deeply about the experience of both our customers and the engineers building for them
• You challenge assumptions and distinguish underlying causes from visible symptoms
• You enable teams rather than becoming a gatekeeper or permanent dependency
• You are energized by ambiguous problems whose solutions require architecture, implementation, influence, and organizational change
• You are comfortable moving between long-term technical strategy and hands-on implementation when necessary
• You think in systems and look for leverage across organizational and technical boundaries
• You build credibility through sound judgment, clear communication, and measurable results