Senior Staff Architect, Real-Time Recognition Platform

Metropolis; Seattle (WA); On-site; USD 231,000 - 268,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Stock options

Healthcare benefits

401(k) plan

Disability insurance

Life insurance

Office-first: 4 days in the office

Job summary

Metropolis in Seattle, WA, is hiring a Senior Staff Software Engineer for the Recognition Platform to own the platform architecture and guide cross-functional teams across application engineering, computer vision, data, security, and partner integrations.

The role focuses on building high-volume edge-to-cloud pipelines and real-time decisioning systems, with a strong emphasis on architecture, RFCs, and collaboration. The base salary reflects a competitive package and on-site work requirements.

Qualifications

• 12+ years of experience building and operating distributed, data-intensive production systems.
• Proven track record of cross-functional technical leadership and aligning independent engineering teams on shared architecture.
• Expert proficiency in a JVM language such as Java or Scala, alongside fluency in event-driven and service-oriented design using gRPC/protobuf.
• Hands-on experience designing high-throughput ingestion pipelines with deep understanding of delivery semantics, idempotency, ordering, backpressure, and tail latency.
• Experience building rules, eligibility, or decisioning systems where deterministic logic coexists with probabilistic or model-driven signals.
• Strong systems judgment integrating third-party APIs, SDKs, and vendor constraints.
• Excellent written technical communication skills with a track record of writing decisive RFCs.
• Comfortable navigating physical-world deployment constraints, hardware conditions, and operational messiness beyond staging environments.
• Deep understanding of observability, automated testing, progressive delivery, and fluency with AI-assisted engineering tools like Claude Code and GitHub Copilot in daily workflows.

Responsibilities

• Lead end-to-end architecture across edge ingestion, identity resolution, decisioning, notification, and operator surfaces.
• Drive cross-functional alignment and resolve ownership ambiguities across application, CV/ML, data, security, and platform teams and external partners.
• Evolve high-volume edge-to-cloud streaming pipelines with tail latency, intermittent connectivity, backpressure, and out-of-order events.
• Design rules and decisioning layers for real-time actions including watchlist alerting, routing, eligibility, consent gating, and next-best-action logic.
• Balance deterministic logic with probabilistic signals by establishing explicit thresholds and cost considerations for recognition errors.
• Architect privacy, identity, and consent models for biometric-regulated environments with opt-out propagation in collaboration with Legal and Security.
• Own production quality by defining SLOs, alerting, runbooks, soak testing, and progressive rollout via feature flags.
• Elevate technical standards through design reviews, code reviews, mentorship, and AI-native engineering workflows.

Skills

Distributed systems

Cross-functional leadership

Java/Scala

Event-driven design

gRPC/protobuf

Edge-to-cloud pipelines

Observability

RFC design & reviews

Tools

gRPC/protobuf

Job description

Metropolis in Seattle, WA, is hiring a Senior Staff Software Engineer for the Recognition Platform to own the platform architecture and guide cross-functional teams across application engineering, computer vision, data, security, and partner integrations.

The role focuses on building high-volume edge-to-cloud pipelines and real-time decisioning systems, with a strong emphasis on architecture, RFCs, and collaboration. The base salary reflects a competitive package and on-site work requirements.