Staff Software Engineer - Platform

We're Sharp Performance

Sharp Performance exists so that everyone who answers the call has someone in their corner who has walked in their shoes.

We help first responders and their spouses thrive through confidential coaching from people with similar lived experience. Our coaches have carried the badge, worn the gear, or stood beside someone who did. Through our mobile platform, we connect law enforcement, firefighters, and other frontline professionals with coaches who understand the job because they have lived it.

We're early-stage and backed by amazing investors. The team is small enough that your work shows up in the rollout, the product, and the customer's experience within weeks. If building something that matters alongside people who hold a high standard sounds better than a safe seat somewhere else, come build it with us.

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.