Staff Software Engineer (m/f/d)

Checkmk is a leading hybrid IT monitoring software company, and they are seeking a Staff Software Engineer to lead architectural initiatives and improve the overall software development process. The role involves identifying structural problems, driving architectural improvements, and collaborating with various teams to enhance product quality and delivery.

Responsibilities:

• Derive key architectural pain points from codebase analysis, incident patterns, developer friction, and business direction
• Create clear priorities and actionable plans to address those pain points, with defined milestones and success criteria and align them with the team and the management
• Follow through on those plans until final delivery, coordinating work across multiple teams where necessary
• Define and communicate the architectural vision for significant parts of the codebase, translating that vision into concrete roadmap input
• Anticipate future technological shifts and position the organisation to respond early rather than reactively
• Present architecture reviews and contribute to tech strategy documents that inform leadership decisions
• Serve as a subject matter expert across multiple technical domains, providing guidance on unfamiliar parts of the codebase with confidence
• Drive the adoption of new technologies and approaches where they offer genuine competitive advantage
• Identify critical code paths and propose or implement solutions that measurably improve performance, reliability, or maintainability
• Tackle unprecedented, highly ambiguous problems with appropriate solutions
• Stay current with industry developments and strategically apply relevant advancements to Checkmk
• Develop a deep understanding of Checkmk as a product: how it is used, where it creates value, and where it falls short in real customer environments
• Ground architectural decisions in the reality of users and operators, not only in technical elegance or internal engineering concerns
• Engage directly with product management, customer-facing teams, and, where useful, customers themselves to validate assumptions and pressure-test proposals
• Translate customer pain and product strategy into technical priorities, and push back when architectural work risks drifting away from user value
• Autonomously identify weak spots in technology and process across the organisation, then deliver solutions with measurable impact
• Establish coding standards, design patterns, and architectural best practices that teams can adopt independently
• Mentor and coach senior and staff engineers, broadening their impact across teams
• Raise the bar on testing and quality engineering: define testing strategies across unit, integration, and end-to-end layers, improve test infrastructure and coverage where it matters most, and embed quality practices into how teams work rather than treating them as an afterthought
• Lead the creation and maintenance of critical technical documentation and knowledge bases
• Set a high standard in code reviews and technical guidance that elevates engineering quality across teams
• Break down large, ambiguous initiatives into actionable plans that can be implemented across multiple teams
• Lead cross-functional efforts to deliver high-impact projects, coordinating engineers, aligning stakeholders, and managing risks
• Sponsor roadmap initiatives, coach their owners, and actively invest in derisking to ensure timely delivery
• Balance long-term strategic work with day-to-day execution, choosing the right levers to maximise impact
• Weigh the pros and cons of technical decisions with explicit regard to business goals, communicating trade-offs clearly to senior leadership

Requirements:

• Extensive track record in software engineering, with demonstrable experience owning and delivering complex, cross-team architectural initiatives from diagnosis through to production
• Deep architectural expertise: you can assess a large, mature codebase, identify systemic issues, prioritise them against business needs, and build a credible plan to resolve them
• You have experience with Python, Vue.js, TypeScript
• Subject matter expertise across multiple technical domains, with the ability to quickly orient in unfamiliar parts of the stack and make sound judgements under uncertainty
• Proven ability to influence without authority, building conviction across teams, departments, and senior leadership for technically difficult or disruptive changes
• Strong hands-on skills: you lead by example and remain close enough to the code to retain credibility with the engineers you guide
• Experience in defining engineering standards, best practices, and architectural guidelines that have been adopted at an organisational level
• Track record of mentoring senior engineers and measurably elevating team performance
• Strategic thinking paired with disciplined execution: you finish what you start
• Excellent communication skills, able to present technical vision and trade-offs to both engineering and non-engineering stakeholders
• Business fluent in English; German language skills or willingness to learn are a plus
• Degree in Computer Science or equivalent practical experience
• A plus would be if you have experience with Bazel, C++ and/or Rust