Staff Software Engineer

WME - William Morris Endeavour; California; On-site; USD 176,000 - 235,000; Full time

Job summary

William Morris Endeavor (WME) is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to own a major area of our platform. This senior-ownership role focuses on architecture, staffing, and roadmap alignment rather than individual ticket execution.

You'll lead multiple teams, set technical direction, and partner with product, design, and TPMs to deliver scalable, AI-assisted solutions that improve how agents manage relationships, deals, and opportunities across the entertainment industry.

Qualifications

• Experience owning outcomes across multiple teams or workstreams.
• Strong track record of surfacing risk early and pushing back on scope.
• Experience growing engineers into technical leadership.
• Comfort owning a roadmap and defending prioritization.
• Hiring and interviewing experience.
• Ability to work where systems and orgs are still forming.

Responsibilities

• Own an area of the platform and drive outcomes for one or more teams.
• Raise risks early and ensure realistic timelines and budgets.
• Provide context to engineers about priorities and tradeoffs.
• Maintain technical health and architecture direction.
• Own the roadmap and defend sequencing for the next quarter.
• Mentor engineers to grow into technical leadership.
• Collaborate with TPMs and other leaders on delivery.

Skills

15+ years software engineering

Full-stack web development

React

TypeScript

Next.js

Node.js

PostgreSQL

Azure cloud

CI/CD

Terraform

Docker

Kubernetes

Hiring & mentoring

Tools

Azure DevOps

GitHub Actions

Job description

WME is building the next generation of internal platforms that power one of the world's leading entertainment companies. The software we build helps agents and teams manage relationships, deals, and opportunities across the global entertainment industry.

We're looking for a Staff Software Engineer to take ownership of a major area of our platform. This is a senior ownership role rather than a senior individual contributor role. You'll be accountable for whether your area is staffed well, moving at the speed the business needs, aligned with product, and making deliberate architectural choices. You'll be working through the team leads who run day-to-day execution rather than driving that execution yourself.

Deep technical judgment still matters here. You can't set a technical bar you couldn't personally meet, and you'll make the calls that shape how these systems evolve. But the work happens a level up from the ticket queue, and the engineers who thrive in this role are the ones who find that shift energizing rather than limiting.

We're building this engineering organization largely from the ground up, so we're looking for people who enjoy scrappy environments, are comfortable navigating ambiguity, and want to help shape how a team operates. We're also investing heavily in AI-assisted development, and engineers here actively use modern AI tools and workflows to improve development velocity and product quality. We take the work seriously, but not ourselves.

What You'll Do

• Own an area of the platform. You'll be responsible for the outcomes of one or more teams working across a connected set of product surfaces. Scope is assigned based on business need and shifts as the org grows.
• Keep leadership ahead of risk. Your manager should hear about slippage, resourcing gaps, or a bad bet before they have to ask. That includes pushing back if a timeline isn't realistic, or a product ask will create debt worth knowing about. Raising risk early is never treated as a failure here.
• Give your teams context. Engineers in your area should understand why a priority exists, why a tradeoff was made, and why something changed. You're the connection between company direction and day-to-day execution.
• Own technical health. Staffing mix, delivery pace, product alignment, and architectural direction all sit with you. A team can be fully staffed and shipping quickly while quietly accumulating problems, so tracking velocity isn't the same as setting the technical bar — you're responsible for both.
• Own the roadmap. You should be able to articulate what your area is building over the next quarter and defend the sequencing on your own.
• Grow leads. Identifying and developing engineers who can own execution is a core part of the job, not a side effect of it.
• Hire. You'll source and interview for your own teams and weigh in on candidates joining them.
• Partner with a technical program manager. You'll work alongside a TPM who runs planning cadence, cross-team dependencies, and operational execution. You set the direction and make the calls; they keep the machinery of delivery running, so you're not absorbed into it.
• Make architectural calls. Including the uncomfortable ones. You decide where to take on debt and where to pay it down, rather than letting either drift by default.
• Shape architecture beyond your own area. You'll work with engineering leadership and peer Staff Engineers on overall system architecture and the shared components that cut across products.

Example Problems You Might Own

• Designing systems that capture and connect relationships across the entertainment industry
• Building modern CRM workflows that replace fragmented legacy tools and spreadsheets
• Developing AI-powered features that surface insights from operational data
• Creating APIs and services that support complex deal and workflow management
• Migrating legacy applications into modern web-based systems

What We're Looking For

Ownership and judgment

• Experience owning outcomes across multiple teams or workstreams at once, through leads rather than direct execution
• A track record of surfacing risk early and pushing back constructively on unrealistic scope or timelines
• Experience growing engineers into technical leadership
• Comfort owning a roadmap and defending its prioritization
• Hiring and interviewing experience
• Comfort working where systems, processes, and org structure are still forming

Technical depth

• Extensive software engineering experience, typically 15+ years
• Strong full-stack background building modern web applications, with deep proficiency in React, TypeScript, and Next.js
• Solid backend experience with Node.js, building scalable services and APIs (REST and gRPC)
• Experience designing and managing relational databases, particularly PostgreSQL
• Experience with cloud infrastructure; Azure preferred, including cloud-native services such as serverless functions, managed databases, queues, and blob storage
• Containerized workloads with Docker and Kubernetes, and infrastructure as code with Terraform
• Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines and developer tooling (GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps, or similar)
• Strong product instincts and a collaborative mindset

How We Build

• Ship practical software that solves real problems
• Favor simple, maintainable architectures
• Work closely across engineering, product, and design
• Use modern cloud infrastructure (Azure), Terraform, and containerized deployments
• Maintain automated CI/CD pipelines to keep shipping fast and safe
• Leverage AI-assisted development across the engineering workflow

AI-First Engineering

AI tools are part of our everyday engineering workflow. We encourage engineers to use modern AI-assisted development tools to accelerate coding, testing, debugging, and system design, and we're actively exploring how AI can enhance the systems we build.

Per local requirements and in the interest of transparency, the rate shown below reflects the prevalent current hiring range for this position. Hiring pay rates are based on a number of factors, including location and may vary depending on job-related qualifications, knowledge, skills and experience. The company strives to provide locally competitive rewards packages, which include base rate along with, as applicable, short- and long-term incentives, growth and developmental opportunities, and robust benefits, such as health care, retirement, vacation and other paid time off, and additional offerings.

Hiring Rate Minimum:

$176,250 annually (minimum will not fall below the applicable state/local minimum salary thresholds)

Hiring Rate Maximum:

$235,000 annuallyWME is an equal opportunity employer and encourages applications from qualified and eligible candidates regardless of sex, race, disability, age, sexual orientation, or religion or belief.