Staff Engineer

Shipt; United States; Hybrid; USD 96,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Shipt is seeking a Staff Engineer for the Core Services team to lead the architecture of high-scale microservices and influence the technical direction across multiple teams. You will be a technical multiplier, mentoring engineers and setting standards for design, observability, and security.

You will own architectural strategy, guide performance optimizations, and collaborate with product and platform teams to deliver robust, scalable systems powering the retailer management ecosystem.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of software development experience building highly distributed, cloud-scale systems.
• Deep expertise in Go and relational databases, caching, and Kafka.
• Proven ability to diagnose and fix bottlenecks in distributed architectures and high-volume services.
• Mentor to Senior/Engineers and Associate Engineers, guiding architectural decisions.
• Autonomous, ownership-driven with end-to-end responsibility from design to operation.
• Balancing architectural purity with business delivery and iterative delivery when needed.
• Data-driven mindset with metrics to improve test runtimes and SLIs/SLOs.

Responsibilities

• Architectural strategy and ownership for core services built as microservices.
• Drive performance, scalability and robustness of critical systems used by retail partners.
• Collaborate across Product, Platform, and other engineering teams to align on direction.
• Establish domain-wide standards for observability, monitoring, and on-call rotations.
• Lead design reviews and foster engineering best practices and code quality.
• Evolve CI/CD, RFCs and post-mortems to improve velocity without sacrificing quality.
• Incorporate security-first design and review third-party libraries for safety.

Skills

Golang

PostgreSQL

Redis

Kafka

Distributed Systems

Cloud Environments

Education

Bachelor's degree

Tools

Kubernetes

Job description

Impact

As a Staff Engineer on the Core Services team at Shipt, you will act as a pivotal technical leader and architect, defining the future of the high-scale systems that power our entire retailer management ecosystem. You won't just execute a roadmap; you will be instrumental in defining and driving our long-term technical strategy.

Working at the critical intersection of product goals and engineering excellence, you will collaborate with Principal Engineers to ensure our architecture is not only solving today’s most complex problems but is fundamentally prepared for the massive scale of the next three years. You will be a technical multiplier who sets the architectural standard for your domain, elevating the entire Core Services codebase through rigorous design standards, mentoring, and influencing technical direction across multiple teams.

What You’ll Need to Be Successful

Key Responsibilities

• Architectural Strategy & Ownership: Own the architecture and technical quality for all applications developed by your team. You will lead the design and evolution of highly available microservices using technologies like Golang, Postgres, Redis, and Kafka, and will be responsible for defining and driving the technical roadmaps for these core services.

• Systems Scaling & Performance: Drive strategic initiatives to optimize the stability, scalability, and performance of mission-critical systems, ensuring they remain the robust, efficient backbone for Shipt's retail partners.

• Cross-Functional Influence: Regularly work across and influence Product, Platform, and other engineering teams to align on technical direction, prioritization, and solution design. You will translate complex, multi-team business requirements into elegant and maintainable technical specifications.

• Operational Standards: Establish the domain-wide standard for operational excellence. Champion sophisticated observability, proactive monitoring, and sustainable on-call rotations, ensuring our shared services maintain maximum robustness and health.

• Engineering Culture & Quality: Set the highest bar for engineering fundamentals, including test coverage (Unit, Integration, E2E) and code quality. Conduct deep-dive design reviews that foster continuous learning and elevate best practices across the organization.

• Process & Systems Thinking: Evaluate and evolve engineering processes (CI/CD, RFCs, Post-mortems) to eliminate systemic inefficiencies and improve team velocity without sacrificing quality.

• Security Stewardship: Architect services with a Security-first mindset, scrutinizing third-party libraries and ensuring data protection standards are woven into the initial design phase rather than added as an afterthought.

• Technical Communication: Create and advocate for high-quality technical documentation, including high-level architecture diagrams and low-level workflow schemas, to ensure system maintainability.

What You Need to be Successful

• Scale Experience: 7+ years of software development experience, specifically building and maintaining complex, highly distributed systems in cloud environments at significant scale.

• Technical Mastery: Deep expertise in Golang (or similar systems languages) and a sophisticated understanding of relational databases, advanced caching strategies, and message brokers (Kafka).

• Performance Engineering: A proven ability to diagnose, resolve, and prevent complex bottlenecks in distributed architectures, high-volume services, and database query performance.

• Strategic Mentorship: You are a dedicated mentor who can grow the careers of those around you, specifically acting as a resource and guide for Senior Engineers, Engineers and Associate Engineers. You teach others how to avoid architectural and coding pitfalls rather than simply fixing them.

• Autonomous Drive: You thrive in environments with high degrees of freedom, taking full architectural ownership and driving the Definition of Done for your services from concept to operation.

• Pragmatic Approach: You possess the judgment to balance the need for architectural purity with the reality of business delivery, knowing when to build for the long-term future and when to iterate quickly for immediate impact.

• Analytical Quality: A data-driven approach to engineering; you use metrics to improve test runtimes, code performance, and to define meaningful SLIs/SLOs for your domain.

Pay Range: $95,800 - $180,000

Please note that the salary range above is a guideline, and individual total compensation will vary based on factors such as qualifications, skill level, competencies, and work location.

Skills & Education

This list includes key skills used in this job but is not inclusive of all skills needed for the role. Please see any required education below.

Agile Methodology, Apache Kafka, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Go Programming Language, KubernetesBachelor’s Degree or equivalent experience| Required

Work Arrangement

To foster connection while offering continued flexibility, hybrid team members have the following in-office expectations:

Hybrid roles in Birmingham, AL typically work in-office at least 2