Senior Staff Engineer, Recognition Platform Architect

Metropolis; New York, Northern (NY, KY); Hybrid; USD 241,000 - 280,000; Full time

Job summary

Metropolis is hiring a Senior Staff Software Engineer to own the Metropolis Recognition Platform, leading edge-to-cloud pipelines and cross-functional architecture. You will set technical direction, RFCs, and align multiple teams and external partners around the platform's evolution.

The role emphasizes high-volume streaming, privacy and consent models, and rigorous production quality with SLOs and progressive delivery.

Qualifications

• 12+ years building and operating distributed, data-intensive production systems.
• Experience leading cross-functional engineering teams toward shared architecture.
• Expert in a JVM language (Java/Scala) and event-driven/service-oriented design using gRPC/protobuf.
• Experience designing high-throughput ingestion pipelines with tail latency considerations.
• Experience with rules, eligibility, or decisioning systems where deterministic logic coexists with probabilistic signals.
• Strong systems judgment integrating third-party APIs, SDKs, and vendor constraints.
• Excellent written communication and a track record of decisive RFCs.
• Comfort with hardware constraints and real-world deployment beyond staging environments.
• Observability, automated testing, progressive delivery, and fluency with AI-assisted engineering tools.

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 teams and external partner integrations.
• Evolve high-volume edge-to-cloud streaming pipelines on a horizontally scalable backbone with tail latency and backpressure considerations.
• Design rules and decisioning layers for real-time actions including watchlist alerting and next-best-action logic.
• Balance deterministic logic with probabilistic signals by establishing thresholds and cost reasoning for recognition errors.
• Architect privacy, identity, and consent models for biometric-regulated environments with cross-team collaboration.
• 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

Java/Scala

Event-driven design

Distributed systems

gRPC/Protobuf

Streaming pipelines

Relational data modeling

Tools

Git & GitHub

Job description

Metropolis is hiring a Senior Staff Software Engineer to own the Metropolis Recognition Platform, leading edge-to-cloud pipelines and cross-functional architecture. You will set technical direction, RFCs, and align multiple teams and external partners around the platform's evolution.

The role emphasizes high-volume streaming, privacy and consent models, and rigorous production quality with SLOs and progressive delivery.