Senior Staff Software Engineer, Platform
Senior Staff Software Engineer on Sentry's Platform org, reporting to the VP of Engineering: architects scalable technical blueprints, leads cross-cutting platform initiatives end-to-end (cloud infra, streaming, storage, deployment, security), and mentors engineers while reviewing major architecture proposals. Core stack includes Kubernetes, Terraform, Kafka/streaming, and OLAP/OLTP data stores.
- Compensation
- $260K–$400K / yr
- Location
- San Francisco, California
- Work setup
- Hybrid
- Seniority
- Staff
- Employment
- Not specified
- Experience
- 12+ years
- Category
- Software engineering
- Posted
Skills
Must have
- 12+ years of experience building large-scale distributed systems
- 5+ years working in cloud-based environments (AWS, GCP, etc.)
- 3+ years in a technical architecture or equivalent leadership role
- Proven track record of leading cross-team, high-impact engineering projects
- Ability to create production-quality proof-of-concept architectures and write high-quality code
- Deep knowledge of Kubernetes, Terraform, and Service Mesh
- Deep knowledge of Kafka and real-time streaming frameworks (e.g., Flink, Beam)
- Deep knowledge of OLAP/OLTP databases, blob storage, caching
- Excellent communication skills, able to explain complex technical concepts to a range of stakeholders
- Experience mentoring senior/staff-level engineers
Full description
About Sentry
Software runs the world and the pace is faster than ever. Sentry helps developers fix errors and performance issues before users notice, so teams can spend less time firefighting and more time building.
Trusted by 200,000+ organizations, Sentry is today’s application monitoring standard and our team is building its AI-native future.
About the Role
A strong and reliable platform is essential to scaling Sentry for the future. Our Platform organization is responsible for everything that powers Sentry, from cloud infrastructure and streaming systems to storage, deployment, and security. We own the core services and technical foundations that enable every product and engineering team at Sentry to move fast and build with confidence.
We’re looking for a Senior Staff Software Engineer to set technical direction across Sentry’s Platform organization and lead engineering work spanning infrastructure, streaming, and storage.
Reporting directly to the VP of Platform Engineering, you’ll partner with engineering and product leaders to identify where our platform needs to evolve, make architectural decisions across team boundaries, and lead those changes through production delivery. You’ll stay hands-on through system design, prototyping, and code while helping senior and staff engineers lead work across teams.
What You’ll Do
- Set technical direction for platform initiatives spanning multiple teams, connecting architectural decisions to product needs and business priorities.
- Identify and lead changes addressing system bottlenecks, reliability risks, and architectural constraints.
- Own cross-team initiatives from problem definition and design through implementation, rollout, and evaluation.
- Make tradeoffs across reliability, performance, cost, operational complexity, and delivery speed.
- Stay hands-on where your contribution matters most, writing code, building prototypes, and helping teams resolve difficult implementation problems.
- Partner with engineering and product leaders to prioritize platform investments and sequence work across teams.
- Guide major architectural decisions and help teams resolve disagreements with clear reasoning and evidence.
- Mentor senior and staff engineers, strengthening their technical judgment and ability to lead across team boundaries.
How You Work
- You bring structure to ambiguous problems and help teams agree on what to solve first.
- You pair architectural judgment with hands-on engineering and ownership through delivery.