Staff Engineer at waveapps

At Wave, we help small businesses to thrive so the heart of our communities beats stronger.  We work in an environment buzzing with creative energy and inspiration. No matter where you are or how you get the job done, you have what you need to be successful and connected. The mark of true success at Wave is the ability to be bold, learn quickly and share your knowledge generously. 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 Embedded Services pillar, you will serve as the architectural lead for the Payments, Payroll and Risk 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 systems 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: • Drive the evolution of Wave’s technical landscape. • Translate complex business requirements into a sustainable technical roadmap that anticipates future growth and minimizes structural friction. System Stewardship: • 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. • 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. • 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: • Act as a final point of escalation for complex technical decisions • Evaluate emerging technologies and internal proposals, balancing immediate product needs with the long-term health of our ecosystem. Engineering Excellence: • Define and advocate for the standards that govern our craft. • 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: • Collaborate deeply with Product, Design, and Executive leadership to shape the vision of your pillar. • Ensure that engineering is not just executing on tasks, but actively driving the business forward. Innovation & Future-Proofing: • Lead the charge on integrating transformative technologies, such as AI, into our development lifecycle and product offerings to amplify impact and efficiency. Leadership & Influence: • 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: • 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. • 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. • Systems Architecture: Deep expertise in designing, deploying, and maintaining resilient distributed systems within complex, multi-domain environments. • Systems Thinking: The ability to look at a sprawling technical environment and find the hidden dependencies or bottlenecks that slow everyone down. • Organizational Influence: A master of "leading without authority" - adept at building consensus, managing diverse stakeholders, and resolving high-level technical friction across multiple teams. • Engineering Stewardship: A vocal advocate for engineering excellence. You elevate the entire team through high-quality documentation, reference implementations, and mentorship. • 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. • 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. • 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. • Proven Scale: Experience navigating the technical challenges of a rapidly growing business where "what worked yesterday" is no longer sufficient. At Wave, we value diversity of perspective. Your unique experience enriches our organization. We welcome applicants from all backgrounds. Let’s talk about how you can thrive here!   Wave is committed to providing an inclusive and accessible candidate experience. If you require accommodations during the recruitment process, please let us know by emailing [Upgrade to PRO to see contact]. We will work with you to meet your needs.     This advertised posting is a current vacancy.