Staff Software Engineer

About the Role

We're looking for a Staff Software Engineer to join OpenMined, a nonprofit building open-source infrastructure for federated AI.

You'll work across every squad in Engineering, the teams making this vision real: AI systems built on rare and private data, where inference is fully attributed and every voice can be heard. Today, the data that matters most for AI (a hospital's records, a publisher's archive, a lab's unpublished results) stays locked away, because sharing a copy means losing control of it. So AI gets built on whatever is public, and the people whose data could have made it better get neither a say nor credit. We think there's a better design: data owners keep the only copy of their data and still answer a researcher's query or support an AI prediction, on their own terms and with credit for every contribution, while developers compose models from many independent owners into systems that beat any single model, and prove it in public. Three engineering pillars build toward that, backed by a research scientist team: AI observability, private data on the Syft network, and federated inference across models from many owners. Each squad ships its own open-source projects. What we haven't built yet is the reliable, shared foundation those projects should stand on. Building it, pragmatically and from inside the teams, is the work this role exists to lead.

This is a hands-on technical leadership role, reporting to the Head of Engineering. You write code every day. You set the technical direction for Engineering 6 to 18 months out and build the cross-team agreement needed to execute it. You own the architecture and standards for one or more deployed system areas and make the call on their major design changes. It's an individual contributor role, with no direct reports and no formal authority over team leads, so you lead through design docs, RFCs, code review, pairing, and the credibility that comes from shipping alongside the teams you're guiding. You're the engineer others come to when a design won't survive scale, cost, or the next two years of requirements, and the voice that connects each squad's decisions to the organization's broader strategy.

You bring the judgment that comes from building and operating production systems at scale: the instinct for what will break, the discipline to decouple before abstracting, and the restraint to extract a shared primitive only when it genuinely saves someone work. You bring product sense too. Our users are data owners, researchers, developers, and AI agents, and they need different things from the same system, so you design user flows, APIs, and developer experiences with the same care as the architecture behind them.

If you're motivated by building distributed systems that matter, raising the bar for brilliant senior engineers through craft rather than mandate, and making hard technical calls in a fast-moving nonprofit that's trying to change how the world shares data, we'd love to hear from you. This is a fully remote role for people based in the US, Canada, or Latin America, working within one hour of US Eastern Time.

Responsibilities

• Set technical direction. Identify the highest-leverage technical problems across Engineering, including ones nobody has articulated, and turn them into a 6–18 month technical direction, building the cross-team alignment required to execute it
• Lead through influence. Drive initiatives spanning multiple teams through influence, written argument, and credibility rather than authority, using design docs, RFCs, and decision records that support async collaboration across a globally distributed team.
• System ownership. Own architecture and technical standards for one or more deployed, cross-team system areas; be the decision-maker on its major design changes
• Turn ambiguity into programs. Translate ambiguous organizational and product goals into concrete, sequenced technical programs with success criteria, grounded in user outcomes as well as system metrics
• Establish patterns and shared libraries. Start with problem framing, architectural and design anti-patterns, and decoupling within projects, then identify components that should become shared organizational primitives where they genuinely reduce work. Define standard interfaces that keep teams loosely coupled, and make adoption easy enough that it happens without mandate
• Prevent expensive mistakes. Identify designs that won't survive contact with scale, cost, or the next two years of requirements, and redirect them early.
• Take on the work others can't. Lead intractable performance regressions, high-stakes migrations, systemic reliability failures, including recurring incidents nobody has root-caused. Drive production readiness across teams through monitoring, graceful degradation, runbooks, and incident learning.
• Grow Senior engineers. Delegate genuine scope and coach judgment, not just technique, raising the engineering bar through design review, code review, and pairing
• Advise the Head of Engineering. Surface technical risk, sequencing, staffing implications of architectural choices, and build-vs-buy decisions
• Resolve cross-team disputes. Broker technical disagreements between teams and produce decisions that stick
• Bring the user into every technical decision. Develop deep empathy for our users (data owners, researchers, developers, and AI agents) through direct conversations, usability testing, and analysis of how products are actually used. Translate those insights into product and technical direction.
• Own the end-to-end experience. Design and prototype user flows, developer experiences, and APIs with the same care as the systems behind them, so that UX, interface design, and architecture reinforce one another across products.
• Lead on AI/ML system design. Guide teams on building reliably with LLMs and agents, including retrieval, routing, ensembles, evaluation, cost and latency tradeoffs, and failure modes, and on where AI does and doesn't belong in a product.
• Champion agentic engineering. Model effective use of AI coding agents (e.g., Claude Code, Cursor), and help teams adopt workflows, guardrails, and review practices that increase velocity without eroding quality, security, or maintainability.

Must-Haves

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a track record of personally building, shipping, and operating production systems at meaningful scale, including technical leadership across multiple teams
• Demonstrated product sense and user empathy. You've shaped what got built (not just how) based on direct user research, feedback, and usage data, and you can point to products whose success came from that judgment
• UX and interaction design skills. You've designed user flows, interfaces, and developer experiences (APIs, SDKs, CLIs), and you're comfortable prototyping, running usability sessions, and iterating on design feedback
• Strong AI/ML understanding. Working knowledge of LLMs, embeddings, retrieval, evaluation, and agent architectures, plus the judgment to know their limits, costs, and failure modes in production
• Hands-on experience building production software with AI coding agents (e.g., Claude Code, Cursor), and experience helping teams adopt and govern agentic workflows
• Strong (5+ years) Python (3.12+) proficiency, including FastAPI services, async patterns, typed SDK design and packaging, and Docker-based deployment
• Distributed systems and API design experience, including design and evolution of interfaces consumed by multiple independent teams or external developers
• Technical leadership at Staff scope. You've raised engineering quality practices (code review, testing, CI/CD) across teams and mentored multiple engineers, including other senior engineers or leads (direct reports not required)
• Long range planning experience. Track record of setting multi-quarter technical direction across teams, owning major architectural decisions, and resolving cross-team technical disagreements.
• Comfort with ambiguity and resource constraints, and the judgment to decide what to build, what to defer, and what to kill
• Commitment, accountability, ownership. This isn't just a job: the release gets shipped and outages get restored
• Async-fluent, with strong written communication and the ability to build high-trust working relationships with teammates across time zones in the Americas, Europe and Asia-Pacific
• Cross-functional collaboration and communication that bridges engineers and non-technical stakeholders, including translating user needs into technical plans and technical tradeoffs into product decisions
• Located within ET ±1 to enable rapid team-oriented communication and feedback cycles while engaging with the rest of OpenMined's global engineering team

Preferred

• Practical RAG and information retrieval experience with vector databases, retrieval pipelines, embedding strategies, and aggregation
• LLM evaluation and benchmarking experience, including reproducible evaluation harnesses, model routing, or ensemble methods
• Frontend experience with Vue 3 / TypeScript, or cross-platform desktop app experience (Rust / Tauri), which is extremely beneficial
• Developer tools or platform product experience, building for developers as primary users
• Networking / P2P, cryptography / privacy-enhancing technologies, or federated systems experience
• Open-source experience, especially maintaining projects with an external contributor community
• Go or another lower-level language, and the judgment to know when to switch languages for performance
• Experience managing or formally mentoring engineers, helpful as the team grows (direct reports not required for this role)

Compensation

• Contract fee: $148,000 - $188,000 USD annualized, invoiced monthly.
• Actual offers will be determined based on the candidate's skills, level of experience, and location.

Benefits

• Mission-Driven Work: Be part of a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, focused on social impact rather than profit, offering the chance to make a meaningful difference in the world.
• Open Source Contribution: Make a real impact by contributing to an Open Source project that benefits a broad community.
• Collaborative Global Team: Join a dynamic, international team that values collaboration and diversity.
• Flexible Work Hours: Enjoy the autonomy to structure your work hours around what best fits your life and productivity.
• Fully Remote Work: Work remotely within the location requirements for this role.