Lead/Staff Software Engineer - AI Platform

Socket.dev; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Socket.dev is seeking a Lead / Staff Software Engineer in San Francisco to influence product strategy and lead complex distributed systems deployments for enterprise customers.

You will architect and guide production deployments across cloud providers, mentor engineers, and drive cross-functional initiatives that ensure scale, security, and reliability of our DynamoGuard and DynamoEval platforms in real-world AI deployments.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• 4+ years designing and operating large-scale distributed systems.
• Hands-on experience with Kubernetes and cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP).
• Proven ability to lead architecture and balance short-term delivery with long-term scalability.
• Experience mentoring senior engineers and driving technical excellence across teams.
• Experience collaborating with enterprise customer architects to resolve integration blockers.

Responsibilities

• Lead architecture designs, technical workshops and architecture reviews with customer engineering teams.
• Plan production deployments across AWS, Azure, GCP, and on-premises environments.
• Shape the long-term technical direction of DynamoGuard and DynamoEval based on customer needs and market feedback.
• Identify architectural gaps and scalability challenges and lead platform enhancements.
• Lead investigations of critical customer production issues and coordinate cross-functional incident response.
• Drive prioritization of engineering investments based on customer impact with Product, Customer Success, DevOps, Security, and ML teams.

Skills

Kubernetes

Cloud-native architectures

Python

TypeScript

Go

Leadership

Job description

About the Role

We are looking for a Lead / Staff Software Engineer who enjoys solving complex customer problems while shaping the future of our products. This is a highly cross-functional technical leadership role. You will partner directly with enterprise customer architects, security teams, and engineering leaders to design production deployments, influence our product roadmap, and lead investigations into challenging production issues. You will serve as the technical bridge between Product, Engineering, and our largest customers, helping ensure that DynamoGuard and DynamoEval become production-ready platforms for some of the world's most demanding AI deployments, improving its efficiency, robustness and scalability.

This role combines:

• Product architecture
• Distributed systems engineering
• Enterprise solution design
• Customer technical leadership
• Hands-on debugging and implementation

What You\'ll Do

Lead architecture designs, technical workshops and architecture reviews with customer engineering teams. Partner directly with customer architects and engineering teams throughout the customer lifecycle.

Closely work with the FDE team to plan and track the production deployment for customers across AWS, Azure, GCP, and on-premises environments.

Work with the leadership and Product Management team to shape the long-term technical direction of DynamoGuard and DynamoEval based on customer needs and market feedback.

Identify architectural gaps, scalability challenges, and opportunities to simplify enterprise adoption, and lead the implementation of complex platform capabilities to fix these issues across engineering teams.

Lead investigations of critical customer production issues. Coordinate cross-functional incident response and systematically improve our system and progress to avoid similar issues in the future.

Work closely with Product Management, Customer Success, Forward Deployed Engineering, DevOps, Security, and ML teams. Drive / Help drive the prioritization of engineering investments based on customer impact.

Required Qualifications

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with 4+ years dedicated to designing and operating large-scale, production-grade distributed systems.
• Deep, hands-on expertise with Kubernetes and cloud-native architectures (AWS, Azure, or GCP); must have a proven track record of managing complex deployments in production.
• Demonstrated ability to lead technical strategy, drive cross-functional alignment, and make difficult architectural trade-offs that balance short-term delivery with long-term platform scalability.
• Hands-on experience with Python, TypeScript, Go, etc. in high-traffic environments.
• Proven track record of mentoring senior engineers and driving technical excellence across teams.
• Extensive experience collaborating directly with enterprise customer architects to resolve integration blockers and mission-critical production issues.

Why This Role

Help Enterprises Deploy AI Responsibly

You will work directly with fortune 500 companies designing solutions to protect their AI systems, deploying AI into critical real-world operations, helping ensure customer systems are reliable, secure, observable, scalable, and production-ready.

Enable the Dynamo AI’s Growth at Scale

This role will lead the strategic improvements for customer deployment and operationalization. You will drive Dynamo AI to enable scalable customer onboarding by improving the efficiency, generalization, scalability and security of our solutions.

Operate at the Intersection of AI and Enterprise Systems

You will gain exposure to a wide range of enterprise architectures, governance models, and operational workflows across regulated industries. Your work will directly influence how organizations safely deploy AI systems at scale, while shaping Dynamo AI’s deployment methodologies and product evolution.