Senior Staff Software Engineer

Workiva, Inc.; United States; Hybrid; USD 151,000 - 242,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Discretionary annual bonus

401(k) match

Comprehensive employee benefits

Job summary

Workiva, Inc. is seeking a Senior Staff Software Engineer to lead complex technical initiatives and drive collaboration across teams in an AI-enabled environment. You will shape how products are developed, focusing on software quality and scalability.

The ideal candidate has extensive experience in enterprise software, a strong technical strategy background, and hands-on AI development experience. This role offers a competitive salary and a comprehensive benefits package.

Qualifications

• 6+ years of experience in enterprise software systems.
• Experience leading teams in technical strategy.
• Hands-on AI development experience.

Responsibilities

• Lead technical direction for large initiatives.
• Design scalable and maintainable systems.
• Develop AI systems and enhance engineering workflows.

Skills

Enterprise software systems experience

Technical strategy leadership

AI development collaboration

Systems thinking

Delivery modes experience

Job description

At Workiva, we build and scale an enterprise platform that powers complex financial reporting, compliance, and collaboration for some of the world's largest organizations. We solve for high-throughput data, strict consistency, and architectural scale, while exploring how AI can improve the way engineering teams design, build, and operate software.

We are not simply layering AI onto existing workflows. We are evolving how engineering gets done. That means building systems, practices, and products where AI is a real collaborator in development, testing, validation, and platform evolution.

We're hiring a Senior Staff Software Engineer who can lead across complex technical work, act as a force multiplier for other engineers, and help shape how teams build in an AI-enabled environment. This is a hands‑on role for someone who can contribute directly to design and implementation while also raising the technical bar across the organization.

What You'll Do

Deliver outcomes

• Partner with engineering teams to co-deliver complex work across platform modernization, product evolution, and new product initiatives.
• Adapt your approach to match the needs of the work, whether the priority is speed, scale, or long‑term maintainability.
• Use AI‑native development practices to build automation, validation, and engineering harnesses that improve quality and leverage.
• Help establish thoughtful code review and pre‑production quality practices that support fast, reliable delivery.

Execute technical strategy

• Lead technical direction for large, cross‑team initiatives aligned to long‑term platform strategy.
• Design systems that balance flexibility, scalability, and maintainability.
• Anticipate future constraints and evolve architecture before problems reach scale.
• Identify and resolve performance, reliability, and architectural bottlenecks.
• Drive early‑stage exploration for ambiguous problems, including work where the answer becomes clear through prototyping and building.

Develop AI systems and platform enablement

• Build infrastructure that embeds AI into engineering workflows.
• Design tools and patterns that reduce manual effort through automation and intelligent assistance.
• Create guardrails that support safe, reliable AI‑assisted development.
• Help define system behavior by capturing specifications from code, tests, logs, and the people closest to the work.

Influence and lead

• Raise the technical ceiling of the teams around you.
• Drive alignment across teams and influence key technical decisions.
• Reduce ambiguity and help teams make better decisions faster.
• Create durable artifacts such as runbooks, decision logs, and tests that can be handed off and evolved by others.
• Share context across product domains to help solve problems more effectively.

What You'll Need

Minimum Qualifications

• 6+ years of experience building and scaling enterprise software systems.
• Experience leading technical strategy and architecture across teams.
• Hands‑on experience with agentic AI development, including shipping real work with AI as a primary development collaborator.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience driving high‑impact initiatives across multiple teams
• Experience improving engineering quality through TDD, BDD, load testing, stress testing, chaos testing, invariant testing, mutation testing, or similar approaches.
• Strong systems thinking and judgment, including awareness of second‑order effects.
• Demonstrated proficiency in at least two delivery modes: platform modernization, iterative product evolution, and high‑ambition greenfield development.
• Ability to operate as a force multiplier for other engineers.
• Depth in a domain that materially improves system design or developer experience.
• Proven experience operating at Staff+ level across multiple teams or domains.
• Strong background in distributed systems and platform architecture.
• Experience inferring behavioral specifications from existing systems through code, tests, logs, and subject‑matter experts.
• Ability to deliver production‑quality outcomes in a small, time‑boxed team setting.
• Strong written communication skills and a habit of creating useful, durable artifacts.

How You'll Be Rewarded

Salary range in the US: $151,000.00 - $242,000.00

A discretionary bonus typically paid annually

Restricted Stock Units granted at time of hire

401(k) match and comprehensive employee benefits package

The salary range represents the low and high end of the salary range for this job in the US. Minimums and maximums may vary based on location. The actual salary offer will carefully consider a wide range of factors, including your skills, qualifications, experience and other relevant factors.

Why Join Workiva

Workiva is the platform designed to bring confidence, control, and a competitive edge to the world's most complex organizations. Our AI‑powered platform unifies finance, risk, and sustainability on a single, secure foundation—ensuring data is trusted, traceable, and ready to act on. With an unbroken path from source to output, leaders gain confidence in their numbers, visibility into current and emerging risks, and the ability to move with speed and precision in a constantly changing world.

At Workiva, you'll bring technology to market that executives, boards, and regulators depend on. The work you do here helps organizations navigate uncertainty, maintain trust, and make decisions that stand up to scrutiny. If you're energized by meaningful challenges, inspired by collaborative teams, and motivated to help organizations turn uncertainty into advantage, we'd love to meet you.

Employment decisions are made without regard to age, race, creed, color, religion, sex, national origin, ancestry, disability status, veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, genetic information, marital status, citizenship status or any other protected characteristic.

Workiva is committed to working with and providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities. To request assistance with the application process, please email [e-mail].

Workiva employees are required to undergo comprehensive security and privacy training tailored to their roles, ensuring adherence to company policies and regulatory standards.

Workiva supports employees in working where they work best - either from an office or remotely from any location within their country of employment.