Senior Staff Software Engineer

Maden; Austin (TX); On-site; USD 180,000 - 280,000; Full time

Job summary

Maden is seeking a Senior Staff Software Engineer in Austin to shape the technical foundation across the stack and AI-enabled products. You will own critical features, mentor engineers, and collaborate with customers and partners to solve manufacturing challenges.

This hands-on role requires broad expertise in backend services, data, integrations, cloud infrastructure, and AI, with an emphasis on secure, scalable systems for American manufacturing.

Qualifications

• Extensive experience designing, building, and operating production software systems.
• Experience leading large, technically ambiguous initiatives.
• Proficiency in one or more general‑purpose programming languages.
• Strong understanding of APIs, databases, distributed systems, and cloud architecture.
• Experience building customer‑facing products from concept to production.
• Practical understanding of modern AI systems and integrating AI models into products.

Responsibilities

• Design and build foundational systems for Maden’s products and platform.
• Develop across the stack, including frontend, backend, data pipelines, and cloud infrastructure.
• Lead complex technical initiatives from problem definition to deployment.
• Translate customer needs into actionable product and engineering decisions.
• Create AI-enabled capabilities using LLMs, retrieval, agents, and structured data.
• Establish architecture, reliability, security, observability, and governance standards.

Skills

Generalist engineering

System design

AI integration

Cloud infrastructure

Security & governance

Mentoring engineers

Education

Bachelor’s degree in CS/Engineering

Tools

AWS

GCP

Azure

Job description

Maden is building the next generation of intelligence and procurement infrastructure for American manufacturing. Our platform helps manufacturers understand their operations, make better decisions, find the right suppliers, and procure what they need with greater speed and confidence.

We’re looking for a Senior Staff Software Engineer to help shape Maden’s technical foundation and build products across the entire stack.

This is a hands‑on role with broad ownership spanning product engineering, backend systems, data, infrastructure, integrations, and AI. You should be an experienced generalist who can go deep when needed and understands how to use modern AI capabilities—both within products and throughout the software‑development process.

Responsibilities

• Design and build foundational systems for Maden’s products and platform.
• Develop across the stack, including user-facing applications, backend services, APIs, data pipelines, cloud infrastructure, and third‑party integrations.
• Lead complex technical initiatives from initial problem definition through production deployment.
• Translate customer and business needs into effective product and engineering decisions.
• Design products that can meet the security, privacy, reliability, accessibility, and governance requirements of large institutions.
• Build integrations with enterprise systems, legacy platforms, identity providers, procurement tools, and external data sources.
• Partner with customer security, IT, compliance, procurement, and operational teams throughout evaluation and implementation.
• Identify where AI can create meaningful value across manufacturing intelligence, procurement, search, recommendations, and workflow automation.
• Build reliable AI‑enabled capabilities using large language models, retrieval, agents, structured data, and other appropriate techniques.
• Create appropriate controls for AI‑enabled systems, including evaluation, monitoring, auditability, human review, and data‑governance practices.
• Use AI‑assisted development practices to improve engineering speed, testing, documentation, code quality, and system maintenance.
• Establish high standards for architecture, reliability, security, observability, disaster recovery, and developer experience.
• Make pragmatic decisions about when to build, buy, integrate, or simplify.
• Develop systems that are secure, maintainable, and capable of scaling with the company.
• Mentor engineers and contribute to a thoughtful, effective engineering culture.
• Work directly with customers and industry partners to understand manufacturing and procurement challenges.

Minimum qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
• Extensive experience designing, building, and operating production software systems.
• Experience working across several areas of software engineering, such as frontend, backend, data, cloud infrastructure, security, or developer tooling.
• Experience leading large, complex, or technically ambiguous initiatives.
• Proficiency in one or more general‑purpose programming languages.
• Strong understanding of system design, APIs, databases, distributed systems, and modern cloud architecture.
• Experience building customer‑facing products and taking them from concept through production.
• Practical understanding of modern AI systems and experience incorporating AI models into products or engineering workflows.
• Ability to make sound technical decisions with incomplete information and changing requirements.
• Ability to communicate complex technical ideas clearly to technical and nontechnical audiences.

Preferred qualifications

• Experience building software for or working with large institutions, such as hospital systems, federal agencies, government contractors, universities, or large industrial enterprises.
• Experience operating in regulated, security‑sensitive, or mission‑critical environments.
• Understanding of enterprise security and governance practices, including identity and access management, audit logging, data retention, encryption, incident response, and vendor security reviews.
• Familiarity with compliance frameworks and requirements relevant to government, healthcare, or enterprise customers, such as FedRAMP, FISMA, NIST, HIPAA, SOC 2, or Section 508.
• Experience navigating complex customer organizations and collaborating with security, legal, compliance, procurement, and IT stakeholders.
• Experience designing and documenting systems for formal architecture reviews, security assessments, audits, or authorization processes.
• Experience with enterprise identity and access technologies, such as single sign‑on, SAML, OAuth, OpenID Connect, role‑based access control, or automated user provisioning.
• Experience integrating with legacy systems, enterprise resource planning platforms, procurement systems, or other systems of record.
• Experience building enterprise software, marketplaces, workflow products, or data‑intensive applications.
• Experience with supply chains, procurement, industrial software, manufacturing systems, or enterprise integrations.
• Experience building with large language models, retrieval‑augmented generation, agents, model evaluation, or AI‑enabled automation.
• Familiarity with manufacturing data, including parts, suppliers, specifications, capacity, pricing, quality, and lead times.
• Experience establishing architecture, development practices, and infrastructure for a new product or organization.
• Experience scaling systems and technical processes through multiple stages of growth.
• Strong product judgment and a record of turning ambiguous problems into simple, useful solutions.
• A genuine passion for strengthening American manufacturing and building more resilient domestic supply chains.

About you

You’re an experienced generalist who enjoys owning the whole problem. You can build a user‑facing feature, design an API, model a complex data domain, diagnose an infrastructure issue, and make thoughtful architectural decisions. You know when a problem requires depth and when a straightforward solution is the better choice.

You understand AI as an important part of the modern engineering toolkit. You can identify where it creates real value, evaluate its limitations, and turn it into reliable product capabilities. At the same time, you recognize that great AI‑enabled products depend on strong software engineering, thoughtful user experiences, dependable data, and well‑designed systems.

You’re comfortable building for organizations where trust, reliability, security, and documentation are fundamental product requirements. You can work effectively with a wide range of stakeholders, understand institutional constraints, and find practical paths through complex technical and organizational environments.

You lead through judgment, clarity, and execution. You’re comfortable taking responsibility for ambiguous problems and building foundations that other engineers can extend.

Most importantly, you want your work to matter. You’re excited to build technology for manufacturers and contribute to a stronger, more capable American industrial base.

Why Maden

At Maden, you’ll help define a new category at the intersection of software, AI, procurement, and manufacturing. You’ll have meaningful influence over the product, architecture, and engineering culture while working on consequential real‑world problems.

• Maden is committed to building an inclusive workplace. We consider qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law.