Staff Software Engineer, Authentication Platform

Pindrop; United States; Remote; USD 130,000 - 185,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Remote-first

Unlimited PTO

Health plans

HSA employer contribution

Vision and dental plans

Parental leave

Learning stipend

Team on-sites and events

Job summary

Pindrop is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to define the technical direction for Passport’s cloud services, guiding multi-quarter initiatives to improve reliability, scalability, and security. This role operates across teams, mentoring engineers and shaping architecture while leading migrations and incident response.

Remote-first environment with strong emphasis on collaboration, mentorship, and delivering durable, high-impact solutions in authentication and security-sensitive backend systems.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of professional software development experience building backend services and APIs.
• Staff-level impact: leading significant technical initiatives across multiple services or domains and delivering measurable outcomes.
• Strong hands-on experience with Go, Python, or similar languages, plus a deep foundation in data structures, algorithms, concurrency, and Linux-based development.
• Deep experience designing and operating cloud-native systems in AWS or GCP, including managed services such as S3, DynamoDB, Kinesis, and IAM.
• Proven ownership of highly available systems, including deployment, monitoring, troubleshooting, incident response, and operational improvement, using CI/CD, Docker, and Kubernetes.
• Experience defining or influencing technical standards, architecture, or roadmaps across team boundaries.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to document decisions and build alignment among stakeholders with different priorities.

Responsibilities

• Define and evolve the technical strategy and architectural direction for Passport’s cloud services, spanning multiple subsystems and workflows.
• Lead high-impact, ambiguous initiatives from problem framing and design through implementation, rollout, and operational follow-through, using Go and Python.
• Set technical standards and reusable patterns for cloud-native services across AWS and GCP, including services such as Kinesis, DynamoDB, and S3, with a focus on reliability, scale, and secure production operation.
• Make and communicate consequential tradeoffs involving reliability, scalability, latency, security, cost, and time to market.
• Anticipate systemic risks, identify architectural gaps, and drive mitigation before they affect customers, delivery velocity, or operational stability.
• Partner closely with software engineering, test engineering, research, product teams to align roadmaps and deliver new capabilities.
• Lead technical reviews and facilitate alignment on complex design decisions, migration strategies, and ownership boundaries.
• Participate in incident response for critical systems, translating operational learnings into durable improvements in alerting, runbooks, deployment quality, and service ownership, using modern observability tooling to reduce ticket volume.
• Raise the effectiveness of engineers across the team through mentorship, code reviews, technical guidance, and hands-on collaboration.
• Participate in the team’s on-call rotation, including helping cover after-hours alerts as the team expands distributed support coverage.

Skills

Go

Python

Data structures

Concurrency

Linux

Cloud-native design

AWS

GCP

Kinesis

DynamoDB

S3

IAM

Docker

Kubernetes

CI/CD

Tools

AWS

GCP

Kinesis

DynamoDB

S3

IAM

Docker

Kubernetes

CI/CD

Job description

Pindrop is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to define the technical direction for Passport’s cloud services, guiding multi-quarter initiatives to improve reliability, scalability, and security. This role operates across teams, mentoring engineers and shaping architecture while leading migrations and incident response.

Remote-first environment with strong emphasis on collaboration, mentorship, and delivering durable, high-impact solutions in authentication and security-sensitive backend systems.