Staff Engineer

First American (India); Bengaluru Urban; On-site; INR 4,000,000 - 7,000,000; Full time

Job summary

First American (India) is seeking a highly hands-on Staff Software Engineer to provide technical leadership in a senior individual contributor role with no direct reports. You will lead cross‑team and cross‑product initiatives, contribute to production software, establish engineering guardrails, and build reusable AI frameworks and capabilities.

AI‑assisted engineering is a baseline expectation, with strong experience in AWS, TypeScript/Node.js, React/Next.js, distributed systems, data

Qualifications

• Staff Engineer-level impact across multiple teams, products, or domains.
• Hands-on full-stack engineering with AWS and cloud-native, secure architectures.
• Mentor senior engineers and technical leads; influence decisions without formal authority.

Responsibilities

• Lead cross-team and cross-product initiatives from design through production adoption.
• Design, develop, test, deploy, debug, and operate critical production software.
• Define architectural principles and guardrails while preserving team autonomy.
• Review high-risk designs for tradeoffs, failure modes, security concerns, and integration risks.
• Build shared frameworks, libraries, services, and tooling that improve quality and delivery speed.
• Create reusable AI workflows, evaluations, validation mechanisms, and safety guardrails.
• Apply AI responsibly across design, coding, testing, documentation, debugging, and analysis.
• Establish standards for design, testing, code review, CI/CD, and release readiness.
• Improve reliability, scalability, performance, security, and observability.
• Lead major cross-product incident response and drive preventive actions.
• Design APIs, event-driven systems, distributed workflows, integrations, and data models.
• Translate product direction into technical strategies and implementation plans.
• Mentor senior engineers and technical leads and contribute to technical hiring.

Tools

AWS

TypeScript/Node.js

React/Next.js

Distributed systems

Security

AI Engineering

Job description

We are looking for a highly hands‑on Staff Software Engineer with 12+ years to provide technical leadership to join our engineering team. This is a senior individual contributor role with no direct reports.

The ideal candidate will lead cross‑team and cross‑product initiatives, contribute directly to production software, establish engineering guardrails, build reusable frameworks and AI capabilities, and mentor senior engineers and technical leads. AI‑assisted engineering is a baseline expectation. Strong experience with AWS, TypeScript/Node.js, React/Next.js, distributed systems, data architecture, security, and AI Engineering is required.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead cross‑team and cross‑product initiatives from design through production adoption
• Design, develop, test, deploy, debug, and operate critical production software
• Define architectural principles and guardrails while preserving team autonomy
• Review high‑risk designs for tradeoffs, failure modes, security concerns, and integration risks
• Build shared frameworks, libraries, services, and tooling that improve quality and delivery speed
• Create reusable AI workflows, evaluations, validation mechanisms, and safety guardrails
• Apply AI responsibly across design, coding, testing, documentation, debugging, and analysis
• Establish standards for design, testing, code review, CI/CD, and release readiness
• Improve reliability, scalability, performance, security, and observability
• Lead major cross‑product incident response and drive preventive actions
• Design APIs, event‑driven systems, distributed workflows, integrations, and data models
• Translate product direction into technical strategies and implementation plans
• Mentor senior engineers and technical leads and contribute to technical hiring

Required Skills and Experience

• Demonstrated Staff Engineer‑level impact across multiple teams, products, or domains
• Experience leading complex initiatives through production delivery and adoption
• Strong hands‑on full‑stack engineering skills and willingness to contribute directly to implementation
• Deep experience with AWS and cloud‑native, scalable, secure, and observable architectures
• Strong understanding of distributed and event‑driven systems, including consistency, idempotency, retries, concurrency, and failure recovery
• Proficiency with AI‑assisted development tools and agentic engineering workflows
• Ability to decompose work for AI agents, engineer context and constraints, define success criteria, and automate evaluation, with an understanding of AI limitations, trust boundaries, failure modes, data sensitivity, and human‑review requirements
• Strong knowledge of application security, IAM, threat modeling, secure development, and data protection
• Experience designing reliable, scalable, observable, and operationally supportable systems
• Strong architectural judgment and experience building reusable capabilities adopted by multiple teams
• Ability to mentor senior engineers and influence technical decisions without formal authority
• Strong communication skills across engineering, product, architecture, and leadership groups

Preferred Skills

• Experience building internal AI agents, evaluation systems, context frameworks, or AI safety guardrails
• Experience defining engineering standards across multiple teams
• Experience improving developer productivity through shared platforms, automation, or paved‑road solutions
• Experience with AWS services such as Lambda, ECS, EKS, API Gateway, EventBridge, Step Functions, S3, and DynamoDB
• Experience with infrastructure as code, CI/CD, automated quality gates, and progressive delivery
• Experience with Datadog, CloudWatch, distributed tracing, service‑level objectives, and incident reviews
• Experience modernizing complex systems or building B2B SaaS and enterprise software platforms

Ideal Candidate Profile

The ideal candidate is a hands‑on technical leader who can move between organization‑level architecture and production implementation. They define technical direction, build foundational software, and help multiple teams adopt it successfully.

They think in systems, lead through influence, and mentor technical leaders. They apply AI Engineering with discipline, using context, constraints, evaluations, and human‑review boundaries to improve delivery safely. They are motivated by reusable systems, stronger engineers, safer delivery, and more reliable products.

Area

Technologies and practices

Frontend

React, Next.js

Cloud

AWS, serverless and cloud‑native services, infrastructure as code

Data

Relational and NoSQL databases, data integration and integrity

Security

IAM, threat modeling, application and cloud security

CI/CD, automated testing, observability, reliability, code and design reviews

Coding agents, agent workflows, context engineering, evaluations, validation, and guardrails