Staff Software Engineer: Platform R&D

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Job Overview

We are seeking a Staff Software Engineer to join our Platform R&D organization. In this role, you will help design, build, and evolve the core backend systems that power large-scale cloud services and data-intensive platform capabilities. You will work on distributed systems that ingest, process, store, and serve high-volume operational and telemetry data while helping ensure those systems are scalable, resilient, and cost-effective.

This is a hands-on technical leadership role for someone who enjoys solving complex engineering problems, raising the bar on architecture and operational excellence, and partnering across teams to deliver foundational platform capabilities used broadly across the business.

Key Responsibilities

Design and implement distributed backend systems that support high-throughput, low-latency data and service workloads

Lead architecture and technical direction for services involved in data ingestion, transformation, storage, and serving

Build and improve real-time and near-real-time data pipelines for large-scale platform use cases

Drive system reliability, scalability, and operability through strong design, observability, and automation practicesPartner with peer engineering teams to define interfaces, evolve schemas, and support safe integration patterns across services

Improve system performance across storage, compute, messaging, caching, and API layers

Establish sound approaches for fault tolerance, failure recovery, rollout safety, and capacity planning

Contribute to technical strategy and execution for platform modernization and backend architecture evolution

Mentor senior and mid-level engineers and raise engineering standards through design reviews, code reviews, and operational leadership

Participate in incident response and post-incident improvement work, with a focus on durable fixes and stronger platform foundations

Required Qualifications

8+ years of software engineering experience, with significant experience building and operating production backend systems at scale

Strong experience designing distributed systems and understanding trade-offs around consistency, availability, durability, and performance

Experience building data-intensive applications or platform services involving event-driven or streaming architectures

Strong programming skills in one or more modern languages such as Rust, Go, Java, Python, or similar

Experience with cloud-native infrastructure and containerized environments

Experience with APIs, service-to-service communication patterns, and scalable data storage systems

Strong debugging and performance tuning skills across complex, multi-service systems

Demonstrated ability to lead technically across team boundaries and influence architecture without relying solely on authority

Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to explain technical trade-offs clearly

Preferred Qualifications

Experience with observability, telemetry, or large-scale data platform architectures

Experience with stream processing, message brokers, and asynchronous system design

Experience with distributed databases, analytical data stores, or high-scale storage systems

Familiarity with Kubernetes and modern cloud platform operations

Experience designing systems that balance reliability, cost efficiency, and developer velocity

Experience building internal platform capabilities used by multiple product or engineering teams

Experience with schema evolution, metadata management, or data modeling in distributed systems

Experience leading cross-functional technical initiatives from design through rollout

SolarWinds is an Equal Employment Opportunity Employer. SolarWinds will consider all qualified applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, age, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status, disability, veteran status or any other characteristic protected by law.

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