Staff Engineers partner with Engineers, Product Managers, and Designers to solve complex, high-impact problems and deliver scalable solutions. As a staff engineer, you shape technical direction, design systems for scale and reliability, and guide teams through sound architectural decisions.
As a Staff Engineer in the My Financial Health pillar, you will serve as the architectural lead for the SaaS solutions that drive our organization's revenue, shaping the technical strategy and long-term roadmap for some of our most critical features. You will be a hands-on partner to our engineering teams as we tackle high-stakes scalability challenges, with a particular focus on scaling and optimizing PostgreSQL databases for peak performance and cost-efficiency. A major part of your impact will involve guiding teams through the evolution of our ecosystem, leading the strategic migration of legacy monolithic code into modern, high-performance distributed systems. We are looking for a systems thinker who can balance deep technical execution with the high-level vision required to keep our revenue-generating platform resilient and ready for the next order of magnitude.
While aligned to a primary team or pillar, much of your impact extends across teams and pillars - driving consistency, reducing complexity, and influencing broader platform direction. You work across a range of technologies, helping evolve our stack and evaluate new approaches.
This is an individual contributor role with no direct people management responsibilities, relying on influence, technical leadership, and cross-team alignment to drive impact.
Here's How You Make an Impact:
Organizational Strategy:
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Drive the evolution of Wave’s technical landscape.
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Translate complex business requirements into a sustainable technical roadmap that anticipates future growth and minimizes structural friction.
System Stewardship:
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Drive the cross-domain architectural strategy for the domain(s)/ pillar. You are accountable for the technical integrity of the entire domain, ensuring that individual service designs roll up into a cohesive, scalable system.
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Identify systemic complexities and streamlining them to improve organization-wide delivery. This includes defining clear boundaries and promoting modularity across our stack, ensuring that product squads can ship features without being blocked by legacy dependencies.
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Balance the "Goldilocks" of refactoring—knowing when to perform a surgical fix to unblock a product launch and when to invest in a long-term architectural overhaul.
Technical Authority:
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Act as a final point of escalation for complex technical decisions
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Evaluate emerging technologies and internal proposals, balancing immediate product needs with the long-term health of our ecosystem.
Engineering Excellence:
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Define and advocate for the standards that govern our craft.
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Monitor the health of our engineering practices, using data to identify areas where our execution or values are drifting and taking proactive steps to realign them.
Cross-Functional Partnership:
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Collaborate deeply with Product, Design, and Executive leadership to shape the vision of your pillar.
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Ensure that engineering is not just executing on tasks, but actively driving the business forward.
Innovation & Future-Proofing:
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Lead the charge on integrating transformative technologies, such as AI, into our development lifecycle and product offerings to amplify impact and efficiency.
Leadership & Influence:
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Elevate the collective capability of the engineering team by resolving high-stakes technical friction, and mentoring senior talent to foster a culture of rigorous design and high-velocity execution.
You Thrive Here by Possessing the Following:
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Extensive Technical Track Record: A degree in engineering, computer sciences, or related, and 10+ years of experience in high-scale application development or building sophisticated internal developer platforms and tooling.
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Strategic Leadership: Proven ability to define long-term technical vision and translate it into actionable strategies aligned with evolving business goals, with a strong track record of making high-stakes decisions that balance immediate delivery with sustainable, future-ready architecture.
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Systems Architecture: Deep expertise in designing, deploying, and maintaining resilient distributed systems within complex, multi-domain environments.
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Systems Thinking: The ability to look at a sprawling technical environment and find the hidden dependencies or bottlenecks that slow everyone down.
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Organizational Influence: A master of "leading without authority" - adept at building consensus, managing diverse stakeholders, and resolving high-level technical friction across multiple teams.
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Engineering Stewardship: A vocal advocate for engineering excellence. You elevate the entire team through high-quality documentation, reference implementations, and mentorship.
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Developer Experience (DX) Obsession: A deep understanding of the developer lifecycle and proven ability to identify bottlenecks and eliminate them through custom tooling, automation, or process refinement.
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Cross-Functional Partnership: Experience working as a strategic peer to Product and Design to ensure technical constraints and opportunities are integrated into the product roadmap.
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Operational Ownership: A "builder-operator" mindset, including the willingness to participate in an on-call rotation to support the health of the systems you influence.
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Proven Scale: Experience navigating the technical challenges of a rapidly growing business where "what worked yesterday" is no longer sufficient.