Staff Software Engineer, Platform

Sharp Performance; United States; Remote; USD 180,000 - 230,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, and vision insurance

Flexible PTO

401(k) with company match

Access to performance coaches

Job summary

Sharp Performance seeks a Staff Software Engineer to co‑own the core Laravel monolith, its database, API, and tooling. You’ll set technical direction, write a substantial share of code, and raise the bar for how squads design, ship, and run software.

This senior IC role emphasizes impact over people management. You’ll drive platform foundations, scalability, reliability, security, and observability while collaborating with product and other squads to balance roadmaps.

Qualifications

• 8+ years building and running production backend systems.
• Product-minded with focus on user value and roadmaps.
• Deep platform engineering including infrastructure and runtimes.
• Experience scaling systems through real growth and incident response.

Responsibilities

• Co-own the architecture and long-term health of our core platform.
• Build stable APIs, CI/CD, environments, and feature flags.
• Lead scaling end-to-end; fix bottlenecks before customers notice.
• Decide monolith vs. service boundaries and document migrations.
• Make the platform agent-ready with bounded modules and test environments.
• Improve reliability and security with multi-tenant isolation and SOC 2 readiness.
• Collaborate with C-Squad engineers and align roadmaps.

Skills

Backend systems

Platform engineering

Relational databases

Cloud infrastructure

CI/CD

Distributed systems

Leadership

AI tooling & agents

Technical communication

Tools

AWS

Kubernetes

CI/CD pipelines

Sentry

Datadog

Job description

About the role

Sharp Performance runs a 1-1 coaching marketplace. The C-Squad owns the core platform behind it: the backend, data model, and integrations that coaches, managers, and every other squad build on. That platform got us here. Now it needs to scale to support more users and functionality without slowing the teams that depend on it.

We’re hiring a Staff Software Engineer to co‑own that problem. You’ll help set the technical direction for the platform, write a real share of the code, and raise the bar for how the squad designs, ships, and runs software. This is a senior IC role with team‑level leverage, not a people‑management track.

How we build

We’re all in on agentic engineering. Every squad runs AI agents across the SDLC: implementation, code review, testing, incident triage, and maintenance. We treat agents as participants in delivery, not chat assistants. That means a disciplined harness around them: tight scope, specialized agents, verification, and human approval before anything ships. Right now we’re giving agents controlled access to production evidence (code, logs, database state) so they can test hypotheses and validate fixes themselves.

That changes what platform work means here. Our systems serve customers and the agents building on them. Clean interfaces, fast feedback loops, good observability, and safe guardrails make both humans and agents faster.

What you’ll do

• Co‑own the architecture and long‑term health of our core platform: a Laravel monolith with its database, API, background jobs, and internal admin tooling.
• Build platform foundations other squads rely on: stable APIs and contracts, CI/CD, environments, feature flags, observability, and on‑call readiness.
• Lead scaling work end to end. Find the bottlenecks in the database, queues, caching, and third‑party integrations, then fix them before customers feel them.
• Decide where the monolith should stay a monolith and where a service, queue, or event boundary actually pays off. Write the doc, make the call, and land the migration safely.
• Make the platform agent‑ready: well‑bounded modules, fast CI, reliable test environments, and safe, auditable access for agents to the evidence they need.
• Harden reliability and security as we grow: multi‑tenant data isolation, access controls, audit trails, and incident response that holds up to SOC 2.
• Collaborate with C‑Squad engineers. Review designs and code, mentor, unblock, and keep the squad’s output coherent.
• Work with product and the other squads on roadmap trade‑offs, especially when platform work competes with feature work.

What we’re looking for

• 8+ years building and running production backend systems, with recent time at staff or lead level.
• A product mindset. You care as much about what we build as how we build it. You ask “why” early, push back when something doesn’t serve users, and work with product and design to shape the roadmap, not just execute it.
• Deep platform engineering experience: you’ve owned the infrastructure, deploy pipeline, and runtime of a growing product, not just features on top of it.
• A track record of scaling a system through real growth. You can tell us what broke, how you found it, and what you changed.
• Strong relational database skills (MySQL or PostgreSQL): schema design, query tuning, indexing, migrations on live data.
• Hands‑on with cloud infrastructure (AWS preferred), containers, infrastructure as code, and CI/CD.
• Experience with async and distributed patterns: queues, workers, webhooks, idempotency, retries.
• Comfort leading through influence. You’ve set technical direction for a team and brought people along.
• Daily, hands‑on use of AI coding agents. You know where they help, where they fail, and how to review and de‑risk what they produce.
• Experience building agent tooling or harnesses: skills, MCP servers, eval loops, or guardrails for agents touching production systems.
• Clear written communication. You write design docs people actually read, and you explain trade‑offs to engineers and PMs alike.

Nice to have

• PHP and Laravel (Horizon, Nova, queues). Not required: strong engineers from Go, Python, Ruby, Node, Java, or similar who can ramp quickly are a good fit.
• Experience breaking up or modernizing a monolith without a big‑bang rewrite.
• Observability tooling (Sentry, Datadog, or similar) and running incident response.
• SOC 2/HIPAA or other compliance work in a production environment.
• Integrations with scheduling, calendar, SMS, or email providers at volume.

Why this role

You’ll help own the system everything else at Sharp runs on, at the point where scaling decisions start to compound, and you’ll shape how an AI‑native engineering team works at the platform level. The scope is wide, the team is small, and your calls will shape how fast every squad can move for the next few years. We’re remote‑first, async‑friendly, and low on process.

Why You’ll Want to Be Here

Sharp is a Series A company growing quickly, already working with 100+ public safety agencies, and backed by Andreessen Horowitz and investors behind some of the world’s most successful technology companies. Your work helps improve the health, performance, and longevity of the people who run toward danger.

The package includes:

• Medical, dental, and vision insurance
• Flexible PTO
• 401(k) with company match
• Access to the same performance coaches we offer our clients

Sharp Performance is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We are committed to fostering a diverse and inclusive workplace and encourage individuals of all backgrounds to apply. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, national origin, disability, or protected veteran status.