Staff Software Engineer: Architect & Leader for Systems

Thrive Market; Los Angeles (CA); On-site; USD 160,000 - 225,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, vision

Life and disability insurance

401k + company match

Equity

Flexible PTO

Office in Playa Vista

Free Thrive Market membership

Wellness program

Job summary

Thrive Market is seeking a senior Staff Engineer to set technical direction for Member Growth, owning architecture across pods, and driving scalable, observable systems. You will partner with Product and Design to shape proposals, RFCs, and migrations, ensuring latency and reliability at scale on AWS.

Join a mission-driven team delivering healthy, sustainable products to millions of members. You will mentor engineers, craft architectures, and champion data-driven decisions while aligning

Qualifications

• 8+ years building and operating high-traffic, customer-facing systems
• Strong CS fundamentals: object-oriented design, relational database design, and systems reasoning
• Fluency at the system and cloud level: eventing, workflow orchestration, distributed systems tradeoffs, caching, async pipelines
• Comfortable moving between layers and stacks; stack is PHP/Magento backend and React/Next frontend on AWS
• AWS knowledge (Lambda, S3, CloudWatch, SQS) and store tradeoffs
• Track record of shipping high-impact features at scale
• Setting technical direction with proposals, architectures, migrations
• Strong written/visual communication; diagrams and proposals as thinking-out-loud tools
• Influence without authority across teams
• Helped engineers grow; measurably elevated teams
• Concise, high-level communication with recommended options
• Member-first orientation: Customer, Team, Business
• Observability/monitoring experience (New Relic, Datadog)
• Growth/e-commerce/subscription experience a plus

Responsibilities

• Set technical direction for Member Growth's systems and own architecture
• Identify high-leverage problems and roadmap them with proposals
• Write tech designs and RFCs with diagrams, options, tradeoffs and recommendations
• Decide on eventing, workflow orchestration, caching, and new services
• Design for horizontal scale and low latency under Thrive traffic patterns
• Decompose services into scalable components and plan migration paths
• Collaborate cross-team with Frontend Core, Backend Core, Data, and product teams
• Break complex problems into plan with clear owners; unblock others
• Build consensus with engineers, product, and leadership; defend shipped work with data
• Embrace test-driven development; prioritize quality and observability
• Offer Product and Design options with recommendations
• Define success criteria for design, code, and operations; mentor others
• Own SLAs for Member Growth surfaces and ensure health
• Multiply output with AI tooling for the team

Skills

CS fundamentals

OOP design

Relational DB design

Distributed systems

Architectural leadership

AWS

Communication

Tools

PHP/Magento

React/Next

Job description

Thrive Market is seeking a senior Staff Engineer to set technical direction for Member Growth, owning architecture across pods, and driving scalable, observable systems. You will partner with Product and Design to shape proposals, RFCs, and migrations, ensuring latency and reliability at scale on AWS.

Join a mission-driven team delivering healthy, sustainable products to millions of members. You will mentor engineers, craft architectures, and champion data-driven decisions while aligning