Staff Application Engineer

About the Role

The Staff Application Engineer (Individual Contributor) is a highly experienced technical leader who delivers high-impact engineering outcomes across multiple teams and products without formal people management responsibilities. This role takes ambiguous, cross-functional problems from concept to scalable solutions; drives architecture and systems design that meet Onyx's standards for security, reliability, and performance; raises the quality bar for engineering excellence; and mentors engineers to level up their technical and operational capabilities.

• Lead architecture and systems design for full-stack, data-driven, loosely coupled cloud applications; make pragmatic trade-offs that balance speed, quality, and long-term stability.
• Take poorly defined, high‑ambiguity problems and drive them to a clear specification and execution plan; deliver solutions with cross‑organizational impact and value.
• Own end‑to‑end delivery of large, strategic engineering initiatives, often crossing collective boundaries; ensure alignment to agreed target architectures and standards.
• Write high‑quality, well‑tested code and documentation; produce proposals, runbooks, and operational playbooks that enable clarity, maintenance, and scaling.
• Champion operational excellence: design for reliability and security, implement comprehensive observability (metrics, logs, traces), and ensure robust alerting and SLOs.
• Operate and support production systems: participate in on‑call, lead incident resolution when needed, perform root‑cause analysis, and drive durable follow‑ups that reduce risk.
• Proactively refactor and simplify complex systems; repay technical debt with intent and measurable outcomes; improve performance, scalability, and cost efficiency.
• Develop APIs (REST/Graph
  
  QL/gRPC) and integration contracts that are resilient, secure, and well documented; advocate for consistent patterns across teams.
• Collaborate closely with product, design, data science, compliance/risk, and platform teams to align architectural decisions with user needs and organizational strategy.
• Mentor and sponsor engineers across teams (including senior engineers): raise coding standards, guide design choices, and help others navigate trade‑offs and delivery.
• Elevate engineering practices across Onyx: standard‑bearer for code reviews, test automation, CI/CD, accessibility, performance, and security‑first design.
• Use data to inform decisions; introduce monitoring where needed to improve product and operational outcomes; communicate risk clearly to non‑technical stakeholders.
• Stay current with relevant technologies (cloud‑native services, data platforms, front‑end frameworks); bring strategic insights that shape area‑level technology direction.
• Contribute to cross‑team initiatives that improve ways of working, incident management, support processes, and the overall quality bar for Onyx Application Engineering.

• Bachelor's degree in computer science or related field, or equivalent experience.
• 7+ years of experience delivering complex, production‑grade, cloud applications at scale.
• Experience with backend language and ecosystem (e.g., Python, Java, Scala, JavaScript/Node.js), including documentation, testing, observability, and operations.
• Proficiency in front‑end technologies:
  JavaScript/Type Script with React.js, Angular, or similar frameworks.
• Experience designing and building APIs (REST/Graph
  
  QL/gRPC); solid understanding of integration patterns and interoperability.
• Cloud experience developing and deploying in environments like Google Cloud (preferred), AWS, or Azure; hands‑on with cloud‑native services and infrastructure‑as‑code patterns.
• Experience with authentication and authorization mechanisms (e.g., OAuth2, OIDC); security‑first mindset throughout the SDLC.
• Experience with modern SDLC and Dev Ops tooling: git/Git Hub, CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, containerization/orchestration, metrics/monitoring (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, Open Telemetry).
• Experience in agile software development and common environments such as Jira and Confluence.

• Master's degree or higher in Computer Science or…