Staff Engineer Cloud & Systems

Our client is looking for a Staff Engineer who can move confidently across the application stack, cloud services, and foundational system layers. This is not an "architect-in-a-tower" position, it's a hands-on engineering role for someone who can diagnose, design, and fix complex problems that span multiple domains.

You'll partner with backend, platform, cloud, and security teams to improve scalability, reliability, and performance. You won't be living in architecture diagrams all day, but you will influence architecture decisions and help break down high-level designs into practical engineering solutions.

If you thrive in ambiguity, can go from reading logs to troubleshooting distributed systems to advising on application patterns, this is the role for you.

• Dive into backend services, cloud infrastructure, CI/CD pipelines, and everything between to remove engineering roadblocks

• Diagnose issues in distributed systems: performance bottlenecks, scaling failures, integration gaps

• Debug complex failures across microservices, APIs, identity flows, and cloud components

• Mentor senior/junior engineers and raise the bar on engineering craft

• Serve as a technical "adult in the room" during incidents, releases, and problem escalation

• Translate architectural intent into workable engineering plans

• Support and influence cloud patterns, resource design, networking fundamentals, and service integrations

• Contribute to Azure-related implementations (App Services, Functions, storage, identity integrations, networking basics)

• Improve reliability, performance tuning, and observability within cloud-hosted services

• Improve continuous integration / continuous delivery pipelines (Azure Dev Ops, Git Hub Actions, or similar)

• Promote testing maturity: unit, integration, E2E, load, and resilience testing

• Advocate for automation-first mindset

• Understand how modern apps authenticate and authorize users

• Work with OIDC/OAuth2, JWT, RBAC/ABAC

• Help teams integrate identity correctly without owning security engineering

• Collaborate with architects on system design and scalability discussions

• Partner with SRE, Cloud, Security, and Platform teams to improve system-wide reliability

• Contribute to incident reviews and long-term remediation strategies

• 7+ years as a software, systems, platform, or full-stack engineer

• Experience in one or more backend software engineering languages - C#/.Net, NodeJS, Python, Java/JVM, Golang, etc.

• Comfortable in backend code bases, system internals, cloud integrations, and technical debugging

• Strong familiarity with Azure (preferred) or other major cloud providers (AWS or GCP), big bonus for multi-cloud experience.

• Understanding of:
  Resource models, networking basics, identity integrations, application hosting patterns, CI/CD pipelines, Observability / monitoring, etc.

• Strong understanding of distributed systems principles

• Experience with microservices, API-driven architectures, and cloud-native patterns

• Solid grounding in reliability concepts (SLOs, failure modes, fault isolation)

• Excels at diagnosing messy technical situations

• Communicates clearly across engineering levels

• Helps teams simplify and unblock without ego

• Thrives in fast-paced, ambiguous environments

• Experience in both Microsoft and non-Microsoft stacks

• Familiarity with event-driven systems or async messaging

• Experience contributing to architectural reviews

• Prior exposure to SRE or platform engineering

• Knowledge of container orchestration (AKS, ECS, EKS, K8s in general)

Determining compensation for this role (and others) at Vaco/Highspring depends upon a wide array of factors including but not limited to the individual s skill sets, experience and training, licensure and certifications, office location and other geographic considerations, as well as other business and organizational needs. With that said, as required by local law in geographies that require salary range disclosure, Vaco/Highspring notes the salary range for the role is noted in this job posting.

The individual may also be eligible for discretionary bonuses, and can participate in medical, dental, and vision benefits as well as the company s 401(k) retirement plan.

Vaco by Highspring values a diverse workplace and strongly encourages women, people of color, LGBTQ+ individuals, people with disabilities, members of ethnic minorities, foreign-born residents, and veterans to apply.

Vaco by Highspring is an Equal Opportunity Employer and does not discriminate against any employee or applicant for employment because of race (including but not limited to traits historically associated with race such as hair texture and hair style), color, sex (includes pregnancy or related conditions), religion or creed, national origin, citizenship, age, disability, status as a veteran, union membership,…