Senior Software Engineer, Resilience

Persona; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 130,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical benefits

Dental benefits

Vision benefits

401(k) contribution

Unlimited PTO

Quarterly mental health days

Family planning benefits

Professional development stipend

Wellness benefits

Job summary

A tech company in San Francisco seeks a Resilience Engineering professional to enhance performance and scalability. The ideal candidate has over a decade in software engineering, with skills in observability and performance optimization. This role involves partnering with product teams on critical projects, leading system improvements, and mentoring engineers to elevate technical standards. Enjoy competitive benefits, including unlimited PTO and professional development stipends. Join us to shape the future of engineering at our company.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of software engineering experience in production systems.
• Familiarity with performance, scalability, or observability.
• Ability to explain complex technical ideas clearly.
• Expertise in observability practices.
• Strong interpersonal skills for team collaboration.
• Proficiency in building robust libraries and tools.
• Initiative and adaptability in evolving environments.

Responsibilities

• Partner with product teams on high-impact performance projects.
• Analyze major incidents for systemic improvements.
• Promote resilience patterns and tooling for developers.
• Own observability strategy and tools for system health.
• Mentor engineers to improve performance and reliability.
• Drive accountability through Operational Excellence reviews.
• Define SLOs to enhance user experience.

Skills

Software engineering

Performance optimization

Scalability

Observability

Mentoring

Tools

Metrics

Logs

Traces

Job description

About Persona

Persona is the configurable identity platform built for businesses in a digital-first world. Verifying individuals and organizations is harder — but more important — than ever, with AI enabling fraudsters to launch sophisticated accounts at scale and regulations evolving rapidly.

We’ve built Persona to support practically every use case and industry — that’s why we’re able to serve a wide range of leading companies. For example, Reddit relies on Persona for age assurance and verification to comply with online safety regulations, protecting younger users while maintaining a seamless experience. Meanwhile, OpenAI relies on Persona to keep bad actors out, protecting one of the world’s most powerful AI platforms from large-scale abuse in a time when AI is reshaping the way we work and live.

We’re growing rapidly and looking for exceptional people to join us!

About the role

This isn't just another engineering role. This is a unique opportunity to be a founding member of our new Resilience Engineering function and shape the future of performance and scalability at Persona. As our products grow in complexity and adoption, we're building a specialized team to act as a force multiplier for all of engineering. You won't own a single service; instead, you'll be a trusted partner embedded within product teams, tackling their most critical challenges in performance, scalability, and observability. We’re looking for someone who is a systems thinker, part detective, part diplomat, and part architect, and who’s ready to help build a new function from the ground up.

What you'll do at Persona

• Partner with product teams on short-term, high-impact projects to solve their most pressing performance and observability challenges.
• Dive deep into major incidents to uncover underlying architectural causes and drive systemic improvements to prevent future failures.
• Design, build, and promote reusable resilience patterns and tooling that make it easy for all engineers to build reliable services.
• Own and advance our observability strategy, defining the standards and building the tools that help us understand system health.
• Mentor and coach engineers across the organization, raising the technical bar for performance and reliability.
• Establish and drive a new Operational Excellence review process to foster a culture of accountability and continuous learning.
• Help define and measure SLOs for our most critical user journeys, making our product tangibly faster and more reliable for customers.

What you'll bring to Persona

• A strong software engineering background, demonstrated by 10+ years of experience building and shipping complex production systems.
• Direct experience in performance, scalability, or observability is a significant plus, but not required for a candidate with a deep engineering foundation.
• Enjoys mentoring other engineers and can clearly and concisely explain complex technical ideas.
• Deep expertise in the three pillars of observability (metrics, logs, and traces) and experience in instrumenting complex, distributed systems.
• The ability to listen with empathy, build trust, and influence other teams without direct authority.
• Ability to build robust, well-tested libraries and tools that improve the work of other engineers.
• Takes Initiative, comfortable with ambiguity, and effective at driving projects in a new and evolving environment.

Full-time Employee Benefits and Perks

For full-time employees (excluding internship and contractor opportunities), Persona offers a wide range of benefits, including medical, dental, and vision, 3% 401(k) contribution, unlimited PTO, quarterly mental health days, family planning benefits, professional development stipend, wellness benefits, among others. While we believe competitive compensation and benefits are a critical aspect of you deciding to join us, we do hope you consider why our core values and culture are right for you. If you’d like to better understand what it’s like working at Persona, feel free to check out our reviews on Glassdoor.