Staff Software Engineer

Rokt; Austin (TX); Hybrid; USD 470,000 - 615,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

401K matching

Health insurance

Wellness allowances

Daily catered lunch

Dog-friendly offices

Extra leave

Job summary

Rokt is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to lead the architecture, design, and delivery of scalable services powering its ecommerce platform. You will set technical direction across teams for high-throughput systems handling billions of transactions.

Pathways to Principal Engineer or Engineering Manager tracks exist, with a hybrid work structure and world-class benefits. You will mentor engineers and drive improvements across reliability, latency, and cost.

Qualifications

• Relevant bachelor's degree (or equivalent experience) and 10+ years in commercial software development.
• Experience designing, building, and operating distributed systems at internet scale.
• Experience with cloud platforms, CI/CD pipelines, and containerisation/orchestration tools.

Responsibilities

• Own the architecture, design, development, testing, deployment and maintenance of high-throughput, low-latency services in Go, Scala, Java, C#, or TypeScript.
• Drive systemic performance optimisations and refactors that improve reliability, latency, and cost across multiple services or teams.
• Lead root cause analysis on complex production incidents and drive the engineering response.
• Own architectural decisions and lead system design reviews across teams for scalable solutions.
• Mentor senior and mid-level engineers and support their growth toward technical leadership.
• Work cross-functionally with engineering and product leadership to plan and manage roadmap delivery.
• Set standards for technical excellence, from coding to architectural best practices.

Skills

Go

Scala

Java

C#

TypeScript

Distributed systems

Leadership

Education

Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

CI/CD pipelines

Cloud platforms

Job description

Rokt is an ecommerce technology company with the mission of making every transaction more relevant. The Rokt ecommerce Network leverages proprietary machine learning recommendation systems, powering billions of transactions for hundreds of millions of customers, and is trusted to do this by companies like Live Nation, Fanatics, Macy's, AMC Theatres, PayPal, Uber, Hulu, Staples, Albertsons and HelloFresh.

The Role:

As a Staff Software Engineer on one of Rokt's core platform teams, you will lead the architecture, design, and delivery of the scalable services behind Rokt's ecommerce platform, setting technical direction across teams for systems that power over 10 billion transactions a year.

Growth:

Pathways to Principal Software Engineer (IC Track) and Engineering Manager/Director (People Leader Track) per your preferences and abilities.

Pay:

Target total compensation ranges from $470k - $615k, comprised of a fixed annual salary of $290k - $360k, plus employee equity plan grant. In addition, you will receive world-class employee benefits.

Responsibilities

Technical

• Own the architecture, design, development, testing, deployment and maintenance of high-throughput, low-latency services in languages like Go, Scala, Java, C#, or TypeScript.
• Drive systemic performance optimisations and refactors that improve reliability, latency, and cost across multiple services or teams.
• Lead root cause analysis on complex, cross-system production incidents, and drive the engineering response that prevents recurrence.
• Own architectural decisions and lead system design reviews across teams, ensuring solutions scale as transaction volume and traffic grow.
• Research and leverage AI tooling, LLMs, and agents to automate manual processes, accelerate learning, and lift developer productivity across the org.
• Contribute to knowledge sharing through tech talks, brown bags, and best practice evangelism.

Leadership

• Act as technical and project leader across a group of engineers spanning one or more teams.
• Provide leadership on complex technical issues, unblocking teams and de-risking high-stakes delivery.
• Set standards for technical excellence, from coding to architectural best practices.
• Mentor senior and mid-level engineers, and support their growth toward technical leadership.
• Work cross-functionally with engineering and product leadership to plan and manage delivery expectations of roadmap items.
• Actively monitor progress and intervene where required to mitigate risks and bottlenecks, managing expectations within and outside the team.

• Relevant bachelor's degree (or equivalent experience) and 10+ years in commercial software development, designing, building, and operating distributed systems in modern languages like C#, Go, Java, Scala, or TypeScript,
• Track record of owning system architecture and driving delivery in a high-throughput, low-latency production environment at internet scale, with your own designs having gone to production and been operated at scale.
• Experience with cloud platforms, CI/CD pipelines, and containerisation and orchestration tools (Docker/Kubernetes).

+ Deep expertise in at least one of the following:

• High-throughput, low-latency distributed systems. Designing and operating internet scale backend services and APIs, with versioning, performance, scalability, and reliability treated as first-order concerns.
• Data engineering. Building and scaling ingestion and storage on open-source foundations like Kafka, Spark, Cassandra, Iceberg, and Trino. Owning data systems that stay correct and queryable as volume grows by orders of magnitude.
• MLOps. Building the infrastructure that lets ML move from notebook to production: feature and data access at scale, model management & training, deployment, and the tooling ML Applied Scientists depend on to ship and iterate.
• Site Reliability Engineering. Owning the operational surface of high-traffic systems: observability, anomaly detection, incident response, and automations that keep on-call sustainable as the network grows. Owning and Administering cloud platforms, CI/CD pipelines, and containerisation and orchestration tools
• Web & Mobile front-end & SDKs. Building and refining Rokt's Web and Mobile Software Development Kits for performance, security, and seamless integration across thousands of partner environments.

Hybrid work structure

Rokt has a 4 day in-office, 1 day remote hybrid structure, with a flexible approach to start/finish times.

• Equity in a profitable, fast-growing company approaching $1 Billion in revenue.
• Dollar-for-dollar 401K matching plan (up to 4% of fixed annual remuneration)
• Fully funded health insurance (Dental, Optical, and Medical)
• Generous allowances for wellness, technology, mobile, and transit.
• Daily catered lunch, stocked pantry & fridges
• Dog-friendly offices
• Extra leave (bonus annual leave, sabbatical leave etc.)

Equal employment opportunities are available to all applicants without regard to race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.

Note: The first stage of Rokt's recruitment process is a 15-minute online aptitude test, which will be sent out to your application email. Successful candidates will be contacted on next steps.