Software Engineer, Software Architect

Captivate

IQ’s Overview

Captivate

IQ is transforming the way companies plan, manage, and optimize sales performance. We started by revolutionizing incentive compensation management, and now we’re expanding our platform to solve broader sales planning challenges. Recognized by industry analysts like Forrester and G2 and backed by top‑tier investors, including Sequoia, ICONIQ, Accel, and Sapphire Ventures, we empower high‑growth companies like Netflix, Figma, and Stripe with the flexibility and insights needed to drive revenue performance.

Captivate

IQ’s modeling engine is the computation core that powers every product – turning business models into real‑time, trustworthy calculations at enterprise scale. We’re looking for a Staff Software Engineer to set the technical strategy for the Modeling Platform team, which owns and evolves this universal computation engine as a single unified service.

This is a strategic technical leadership role with multi‑year scope. You’ll evolve an established computation platform into a distributed architecture that scales from tens of millions to billions of records with real‑time performance and deterministic accuracy. You’ll make high‑stakes technical decisions – horizontal scaling strategies, materialization approaches, storage engine tradeoffs – and be responsible for choices that affect product teams across the organization.

As the technical anchor on the Modeling Platform team, you’ll be a force multiplier who makes the entire team and broader engineering organization better – through design leadership, mentorship, and raising the engineering bar. You’ll lead by influence across organizational boundaries, driving alignment between consuming product teams and the platform. You’ll invest deeply in coaching and developing engineers toward senior and staff‑level impact.

• Set the multi‑year technical strategy for the modeling platform, partnering with senior EPD leadership on long‑term vision
• Architect distributed computation systems that scale horizontally with predictable SLAs, evolving from single‑node to partitioned, parallel execution at enterprise scale
• Own technical decisions with organization‑wide impact where the right answer is ambiguous or contested
• Drive operational excellence for mission‑critical financial workloads: reliability, observability, graceful degradation, cost efficiency, and incident response
• Design platform APIs and SDKs consumed by multiple product teams, ensuring consistent behavior, strong contracts, and rapid feature adoption
• Be a force multiplier – elevate engineering capabilities across teams through design leadership, code review standards, architectural mentorship, and knowledge sharing that scales beyond your own direct contributions
• Invest deeply in coaching engineers, helping them grow in scope and develop toward senior and staff‑level impact
• Participate in an on‑call rotation to provide after‑hours support, ensuring timely resolution of critical issues and maintaining system uptime

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience with progression into staff‑level technical leadership
• Deep expertise in distributed systems and data‑intensive architectures at scale
• Track record of operational excellence for mission‑critical production systems
• Demonstrated force multiplier – elevates teams through mentorship, design leadership, and raising the technical bar
• Ability to set technical strategy across teams and make high‑stakes decisions under ambiguity

• Experience with Go and/or Python for backend systems
• Familiarity with columnar data formats (Apache Arrow, Parquet) and OLAP storage engines (Click House, DuckDB, or similar)
• Experience evolving monolithic systems into distributed architectures (partitioning, coordination, fault tolerance)
• Background in computation engines, formula evaluation systems, spreadsheet engines, or financial modeling platforms
• Experience with materialization strategies, caching architectures, or change‑data‑capture systems
• Experience designing platform SDKs or APIs consumed by multiple product teams
• Experience building and scaling internal platforms or developer experience…