Software Engineer, Resilience

Persona; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, and vision insurance

401(k) contribution

Unlimited PTO

Quarterly mental health days

Family planning benefits

Professional development stipend

Wellness benefits

Wellness benefits

Job summary

A pioneering identity platform is seeking a Resilience Engineer in San Francisco. This unique role offers the chance to join a new Resilience Engineering function, focusing on performance, scalability, and observability. The ideal candidate has over 7 years of software engineering experience and a passion for mentoring others. Responsibilities include partnering with product teams, driving improvements from incidents, and creating resilience patterns. Competitive benefits include medical coverage, unlimited PTO, and professional development stipends.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of experience building and shipping complex production systems.
• Enjoy mentoring engineers and explaining complex ideas.
• Deep expertise in observability (metrics, logs, traces).
• Deep expertise in metrics, logs, and traces for instrumenting distributed systems.
• Empathy, trust-building, and influence without direct authority.

Responsibilities

• Partner with product teams on performance and observability projects.
• Drive systemic improvements from major incidents.
• Create reusable resilience patterns and tooling.
• Own and advance our observability strategy, defining standards and building the tools that measure 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 accountability and continuous learning.
• Help define and measure SLOs for critical user journeys to improve speed and reliability.

Skills

Software engineering background

Mentoring others

Observability metrics

Build robust libraries

Mentoring

Empathy & collaboration

Tools

Instrumentation 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 7+ 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.