Staff Software Engineer: Lead Cross‑Team, AI‑Driven Platform

Swap; Kraków; On-site; PLN 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive base salary

Stock options

Generous PTO

Private healthcare

Pension contributions

Wellness benefits

Mental health support

Enhanced maternity and paternity leave

Flexible working

Work abroad for 4 weeks a year

Quarterly team offsite budget

Thursday happy hour

Breakfast Mondays

Job summary

Swap is growing its Kraków engineering team and seeks a Staff Software Engineer to lead across multiple squads, shape technical direction, and remain hands-on on critical code paths. You will partner with Product, Design, Data, and leadership to translate ambitious goals into practical plans and measurable outcomes.

You’ll mentor engineers, design for reliability at scale, and push for efficient, secure, and maintainable systems while advancing the company’s agentic commerce platform.

Qualifications

• Significant experience (typically 8+ years) building and shipping production software, with a record of leading complex initiatives that cross team lines.
• Deep expertise in TypeScript/JavaScript and Node.js, including architecting REST and/or GraphQL APIs and distributed systems.
• Comfort outside your home language and stack. We expect Staff engineers to be T-shaped.
• Strong relational database, data modelling, and SQL skills, plus familiarity with NoSQL.
• Experience designing for reliability and scale in the cloud, with solid CI/CD, observability, and incident‑response practices.
• Hands‑on experience with LLMs or agentic systems, or a track record of picking up new technology fast and applying it sensibly.
• Daily use of AI coding tools, with a sense for when to trust them and when not to.
• Experience in eCommerce systems and platforms is preferred.
• Excellent written and verbal communication. You can explain trade‑offs in business terms to any audience.
• A team player with a bias for ownership: you bring a solution along with the problem, and work isn’t done until it’s live and stable.

Responsibilities

• Lead large initiatives spanning multiple teams, from scoping to production.
• Write exemplar code in critical paths and set implementation standards.
• Review designs to balance quality, speed, reliability, and maintainability.
• Define and uphold operational standards: monitoring, availability, scalability, security, release safety, cost awareness.
• Lead tool evaluations and architecture migrations, and make build-vs-buy decisions explicit.
• Apply AI thoughtfully beyond basics to maintain code health while speeding up.
• Own business outcomes: define success metrics, monitor after launch, and push for impactful changes.
• Mentor Senior Engineers and participate in senior-level interviews.
• Document architecture direction, decisions, and runbooks.

Skills

TypeScript/JavaScript

Node.js

REST APIs

GraphQL APIs

Distributed systems

Relational databases

SQL

NoSQL

Cloud architecture

CI/CD

Observability

Incident response

LLMs / agentic systems

AI coding tools

eCommerce systems

Communication

Ownership / leadership

Job description

Swap is growing its Kraków engineering team and seeks a Staff Software Engineer to lead across multiple squads, shape technical direction, and remain hands-on on critical code paths. You will partner with Product, Design, Data, and leadership to translate ambitious goals into practical plans and measurable outcomes.

You’ll mentor engineers, design for reliability at scale, and push for efficient, secure, and maintainable systems while advancing the company’s agentic commerce platform.