Staff Software Engineer, Simulation San Francisco, CA

Linden Lab; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 175,000 - 236,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, vision

401(k) plan

Equity Incentive Plan (EIP)

Job summary

Linden Lab is seeking a Staff Software Engineer for our San Francisco in-office team. You’ll shape Second Life’s server and simulation systems, tackle ambiguous technical challenges, and lead cross-cutting initiatives to keep the platform scalable, reliable, and maintainable.

You’ll mentor engineers, influence architectural decisions, and collaborate with product and engineering teams to elevate the health of long-lived systems in a highly collaborative environment.

Qualifications

• Eight+ years of professional software engineering experience, including real-time or game/server systems.
• Experience designing and operating reliable services across multiple codebases and domains.
• Strong leadership, mentoring, and ability to influence technical decisions across teams.

Responsibilities

• Lead technical discovery, design, and implementation for high-impact changes across large C++ codebases.

Skills

8+ years software eng

3+ years real-time systems

C++ codebase expertise

cloud infrastructure

containerized services

Python or shell scripting

production issue diagnosis

mentoring engineers

technical leadership

Tools

C++ toolchains

Cloud infrastructure

Containerized services

Python scripting

Job description

There are many opportunities to join the innovative, collaborative, and enthusiastic team of people at Linden Lab.

Life at Linden Lab

We are a company of creators, including engineers, artists, musicians, writers, game players and makers. All of us are united in our dedication to creating the future of virtual experiences. We do things that no one else does, and we aren't afraid to take on complex challenges and create unique solutions.

Linden Lab develops platforms that empower people to create, connect, and thrive through transformative virtual experiences. Since our founding in 1999, we have been at the forefront of the creator economy, building durable platforms that support limitless imagination, self-expression, and human connection..

In 2003, we launched Second Life, a vibrant, user-driven virtual world that has grown into a living global community. Hundreds of thousands of people actively spend time there, building relationships, expressing themselves, and creating meaning together. With over two billion user creations and a flourishing $650 million economy, Second Life enables people not only to connect, but for those who choose, to build real livelihoods through their creativity.

Unlike traditional social media, Second Life fosters sustained, positive connection between strangers. It offers mobility, agency, and community to people whose real-world circumstances may limit their options, and it creates space for belonging, collaboration, and shared purpose. For many, it is not just a platform, but a place where they can participate fully and authentically.

The same principles that shape our communities also guide how we work together. We believe our strength lies in diversity of perspectives, experiences, and ideas. Our values are rooted in organizational health, strengths-based leadership, and the belief that collaborative teams are stronger than individuals.

At Linden Lab, your work directly shapes how real people connect, create, and build meaningful lives online. You will be part of a thoughtful, mission-driven team working on technology with real social impact and uncommon longevity. Whether you are building innovative tools or fostering a welcoming community, you will find a place to belong, grow, and do work that matters. We invite you to come as you are.

Work Location

This role requires working onsite in our San Francisco office for full workdays Monday through Thursday. Employees have the flexibility to work remotely or from the office on Fridays as part of their regular five day workweek. Before applying, please consider whether this ongoing schedule and your expected commute are a good long-term fit.

Your Mission

We’re looking for a Staff Software Engineer to help shape the technical future of Second Life’s server and simulation systems. You’ll tackle complex, ambiguous challenges, lead cross-cutting technical initiatives, and help ensure the systems behind Second Life remain scalable, reliable, and maintainable.

We believe the best Staff Engineers create leverage beyond the code they write. You’ll connect teams and systems, identify architectural risks, bring clarity to ambiguity, and help the organization make better technical decisions.

You won’t be joining a team that expects you to simply execute a predetermined plan. We want you to question assumptions, identify opportunities, and help solve problems we haven’t fully defined yet, while mentoring others and raising the engineering bar across Second Life.

How You’ll Grow With Us

At the Lab, you'll experience the best of both worlds: the stability of an established company with over 20 years of expertise and the dynamic momentum of a startup driven by continuous progress. You'll have the unparalleled opportunity to forge meaningful relationships, design impactful systems, and craft strategies that shape the future of virtual experiences.

Our vibrant in-office environment in San Francisco is designed to foster creativity, collaboration, and ingenuity. With spaces purpose-built for brainstorming, team building, and spontaneous conversations, you'll find endless opportunities to engage and grow. We believe in the power of in-person connections to cultivate a strong sense of community and inclusion, ensuring that your ideas are valued, your contributions celebrated, and your impact deeply felt every day.

As you grow in the role, you’ll have opportunities to broaden your organizational impact, contribute to strategic technical conversations, and build relationships across engineering, product, and the wider business.

The Impact You’ll Drive

• Lead technical discovery, design, implementation, and difficult debugging for ambiguous, high-impact changes across large C++ codebases and adjacent systems.
• Take ownership of complex technical problems from initial definition through production, turning loosely defined challenges into practical, durable solutions.
• Develop a deep understanding of Second Life’s existing systems, engineering practices, and operational context before introducing material changes.
• Lead the technical design of initiatives that span multiple systems, codebases, and teams, ensuring solutions work cohesively across the broader ecosystem.
• Guide architectural decisions that improve reliability, performance, scalability, maintainability, and the safe evolution of long-lived systems.
• Proactively identify systemic issues, architectural gaps, and technical risks, anticipating second-order effects and addressing problems before they become larger operational challenges.
• Partner with engineering, product, and other stakeholders to make technical tradeoffs clear, surface risks, and balance near-term delivery with long-term system health.
• Raise the technical capabilities of the team through mentorship, design guidance, technical feedback, and by helping other engineers navigate complex or high-risk decisions.

How You’ll Shape Our Future

At Linden, we celebrate all the dimensions of diversity, including diversity of experience. We recognize that candidates applying for this role will be most successful if they bring the following with them:

Experience

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, including at least 3 years building or maintaining real-time simulation, game-server, distributed, or similarly complex production systems.
• 3+ years of production experience with a large, complex C++ codebase, including strong knowledge of memory management, threading, synchronization, and concurrent systems.
• Experience designing, evolving, and operating reliable services across multiple codebases and technical domains, including cloud infrastructure, containerized services, asynchronous network programming, and Python or shell scripting.
• Proven ability to diagnose and resolve difficult production issues, including crashes, memory corruption, race conditions, and other hard-to-reproduce failures.
• Demonstrated Staff-level technical leadership: independently navigating ambiguous problems, making sound engineering decisions, influencing technical direction, and communicating system designs, risks, and tradeoffs clearly across teams.
• A collaborative approach to technical leadership, including mentoring engineers, building shared understanding of complicated systems, and raising engineering standards.
• Experience in any of the following areas is preferred: interpreters, virtual machines, embedded scripting engines, bytecode runtimes, sandboxed execution, APIs, or long-lived serialization formats. Exposure to virtual-world platforms, MMO or game-server architecture, Second Life, LSL, or Lua would be especially valuable.
• This is an in-office role designed for close collaboration and spontaneous problem-solving. On-call responsibilities are performed remotely.

If you don’t meet every requirement listed for this role, we still encourage you to apply. Too often, the confidence gap or imposter syndrome keeps exceptional candidates from taking the leap—and we don’t want that to hold you back. If you believe in our mission and in your ability to make an impact, we want to hear from you!

The Fine Print

Pay Transparency Notice

Linden Lab’s Total Rewards philosophy is rooted in fairness, equity, and an unbiased approach to compensation, paired with competitive benefits across all locations where we operate.

For this San Francisco Bay Area-based role, the salary range is $174,500 - $236,000, and Linden Lab hires new employees at the midpoint of this range ($205,000). This midpoint represents the amount the company reasonably expects to pay upon hire.

Base salary is the only form of cash compensation for this role; it does not include variable or bonus pay. In addition to base pay, employees are eligible to be considered for awards under our Equity Incentive Plan (EIP) and receive a comprehensive benefits package that includes medical, dental, vision, and 401(k) plans. Our talent partners will provide more details during the hiring process.

Essential Role Functions & Work Environment

The details below outline the core functions and work environment required for this role. Linden Lab is committed to providing reasonable accommodations to support individuals with disabilities in performing these essential duties.

• Perform focused, computer-based tasks and collaborate effectively with coworkers in a dynamic, in-office environment. While some remote collaboration may occur, in-office presence is an essential requirement of this role to foster creativity, teamwork, and spontaneous problem-solving.
• Communicate clearly and effectively through typing, using hands and fingers for keyboard tasks.
• Maintain the ability to sit, stand, or remain stationary for extended periods (up to eight hours) during calls, meetings, or collaborative sessions, with ergonomic workstations and tools provided.
• Sustain prolonged attention on a computer monitor to perform tasks requiring visual focus and attention to detail.
• Operate office equipment and handle materials as needed for presentations, discussions, or team activities.
• Move freely around the office to attend meetings, participate in team activities, and contribute to shared responsibilities, supporting a collaborative and engaging workplace culture.
• Travel may be required for business meetings, team summits, or company events, where in-person participation is an essential part of the role to foster collaboration, alignment, and engagement.

Our Commitment to Equal Opportunity

At Linden Lab, we know that great work can't happen without a diverse team and an inclusive environment. That’s why we intentionally seek out individuals with a wide range of strengths, backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives. We believe this diversity gives us a competitive advantage, helping us better serve our residents, support one another, and grow both as Lindens and as individuals.

We celebrate and value diversity in all its forms, including differences in thought, race, national origin, culture, age, experience, religion, economic and social status, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, marital status, veteran status, and disability. Fostering a culture of inclusion and belonging empowers us to create and share meaningful experiences, both within our team and across the virtual communities we serve. We invite candidates from all backgrounds to apply and help shape the future of virtual experiences.

Global Data Privacy Notice

Your privacy is important to us. Depending on your location, laws such as the California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA) may govern how we manage and protect the personal data of job applicants. To learn more, please review our full notice detailing how applicant data is collected, used and protected in applicable regions.

By submitting your application, you consent to the processing of your data in accordance with applicable laws and our privacy practices.

Linden Lab celebrates diversity of thought, cultural differences, lifestyle, age, background, experience, religion, economic and social status, gender identity and marital status. Building a culture of inclusion allows us to create and share experiences with each other, and with our virtual communities. We always seek to maintain a diverse and welcoming workplace, and candidates from all backgrounds are encouraged to apply.

Location, location, location

Want to work in a great space that is both convenient and inspires creativity?

Our San Francisco headquarters are in a historic building with a rooftop deck that has a great view of the bay. We’re located in a scenic spot just below Telegraph Hill, blocks away from the Embarcadero, and a short walk from BART or a quick bike ride from Caltrain.