Staff Software Engineer, Fullstack

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

About Thrive Market

Thrive Market was founded in 2014 with a mission to make healthy and sustainable living easy and affordable for everyone. As an online, membership-based market, we deliver the highest quality healthy, and sustainable products at member-only prices, while matching every paid membership with a free one for someone in need. Every day, we leverage innovative technology and member-first thinking to help our over 1,700,000+ members find better products, support better brands, and build a better world in the process. We are also a Certified B Corporation, a Public Benefit Corporation, and a Climate Neutral Certified company.

About Thrive Market

Thrive Market was founded in 2014 with a mission to make healthy and sustainable living easy and affordable for everyone. As an online, membership-based market, we deliver the highest quality healthy, and sustainable products at member-only prices, while matching every paid membership with a free one for someone in need. Every day, we leverage innovative technology and member-first thinking to help our over 1,700,000+ members find better products, support better brands, and build a better world in the process. We are also a Certified B Corporation, a Public Benefit Corporation, and a Climate Neutral Certified company.
Join us as we bring healthy and sustainable living to millions of Americans in the years to come.

The Role

We are not looking for a programmer or a language specialist. We are looking for an engineer, someone with strong CS fundamentals, great object‑oriented design, great relational data modeling, and a systems mindset. Someone who reaches for architecture, patterns, and platforms before reaching for syntax, and who picks the right tool for the job rather than the one they already know.
At Staff, that means leverage. You bring the ideas to the table instead of waiting for them. You set the technical bar and raise the people around you to it. You organize ambiguous problems into a plan and drive them to done. You win people over with clear diagrams, written proposals, and data, not seniority.

Responsibilities

• Set technical direction for Member Growth's systems. Own the architecture and its evolution across pods, not just your own.
• Find the highest‑leverage problems and opportunities in the funnel, the platform, and our ways of working, and put them on the roadmap with a proposal.
• Write the proposals. Tech designs and RFCs with architecture diagrams, options, tradeoffs, and a clear recommendation. Make hard decisions easy to understand and easy to make.
• Make system‑level calls on when to introduce eventing (Kafka, SQS), workflow orchestration (Temporal, Airflow, DAGs), caching, async pipelines, or new services, and when not to.
• Design for horizontal scale and low, uniform latency under real Thrive traffic patterns.
• Decompose existing services into scalable components where it materially helps. Plan the migration path, not just the end state.
• Work cross‑team and cross‑function. Partner with Frontend Core, Backend Core, Data, and other product teams to align on shared systems, boundaries, and contracts. Represent Member Growth in technical decisions that affect us.
• Take a fuzzy, multi‑team problem, break it into a plan with clear owners, and see it through. Unblock others.
• Build consensus with engineers, Product, and leadership. Disagree clearly. Commit fully.
• Tie engineering decisions to outcomes. Instrument what you build. Defend what you ship with data.
• Test‑driven from the start. Quality, reliability, and observability are first‑class, not afterthoughts.
• Bring Product and Design options and a recommendation, not a single path.
• Define what good looks like in design, code, and operations. Mentor, review, challenge, elevate. Grow the next seniors and staff.
• Own the SLAs for the surfaces Member Growth runs and the standards that keep them healthy.
• Multiply output with AI tooling, for yourself and the team.

Qualifications

• 8+ years building and operating high‑traffic, customer‑facing systems, including technical leadership across multiple teams
• Strong CS fundamentals: object‑oriented design, relational database design, and systems reasoning
• Fluency at the system and cloud level: eventing (Kafka, SNS, SQS), workflow orchestration (Temporal, Airflow, DAGs), distributed systems tradeoffs, caching, async pipelines, idempotency, backpressure
• Comfortable moving between layers and stacks; language is a tool, not an identity. Our stack today is PHP/Magento on the backend and React/Next on the frontend, on AWS.
• Working knowledge of AWS (Lambda, S3, CloudWatch, SQS, etc.) and clear reasoning about tradeoffs between relational, document, and wide‑column stores
• A track record of shipping high‑impact, customer‑facing features in production at scale
• A track record of setting technical direction: proposals written, architectures adopted, migrations landed, standards others follow
• Strong written and visual communicator; diagrams, design docs, and proposals are how you think out loud
• Influence without authority: has aligned engineers, Product, and leadership across teams on a direction and delivered it
• Has measurably leveled up the engineers around them
• Concise, high‑altitude communicator who defaults to options plus recommendation, not exhaustive detail
• Member‑first orientation: Customer, Team, and Business, in that order
• Observability and monitoring experience (New Relic, Datadog, or similar) to maintain SLA, Apdex, and error rate
• Growth, e‑commerce, subscription, or membership experience is a plus: funnels, experimentation, attribution and pixels, payments and recurring billing.

Belong To a Better Company

• Comprehensive health benefits (medical, dental, vision, life and disability)
• Competitive salary (DOE) + equity
• 401k Employer Match
• 9 Days of Observed Holidays
• Flexible Paid Time Off
• Subsidized ClassPass Membership with access to fitness classes and wellness and beauty experiences
• Ability to work in our beautiful office in Playa Vista
• Free Thrive Market membership with exclusive employee discount
• Coverage for Life Coaching & Therapy Sessions on our holistic mental health and well‑being platform

We're a community of more than 1 Million + members who are united by a singular belief: It should be easy to find better products, support better brands, make better choices, and build a better world in the process.
Thrive Market is an EEO/Veterans/Disabled/LGBTQ employer
At Thrive Market, our goal is to be a diverse and inclusive workplace that is representative, at all job levels, of the members we serve and the communities we operate in. We’re proud to be an inclusive company and an Equal Opportunity Employer and we prohibit discrimination and harassment of any kind. We believe that diversity and inclusion among our teammates is critical to our success as a company, and we seek to recruit, develop and retain the most talented people from a diverse candidate pool. If you’re thinking about joining our team, we expect that you would agree!
If you need assistance or accommodation due to a disability, please email us at [e-mail] and we’ll be happy to assist you.

Job Information

• Compensation Description - The base salary range for this position is $160,000 - $225,000/Per Year.
• Compensation may vary outside of this range depending on several factors, including a candidate’s qualifications, skills, competencies and experience, and geographic location.
• Total Compensation includes Base Salary, Stock Options, Health & Wellness Benefits, Flexible PTO, and more!