Staff Software Engineer

Babylist is a leading platform for expecting and new families, seeking Staff Software Engineers to join their engineering organization. The role involves shaping large-scale systems that impact millions of users while driving cross-team technical direction and leveraging AI in development processes.

Responsibilities:

• Cross-Team Ownership — take a fuzzy business need through design, build, and production across pod boundaries, with minimal handoffs and maximum accountability
• AI-Native Development — use AI tools as genuine force multipliers and set the standard, across pods, for what high-quality AI-assisted engineering actually looks like
• System Design — make architectural calls that span services and teams, balance speed, quality, and long-term maintainability, and bring people along so the decisions stick
• Cross-Functional Partnership — work directly with product, design, and data as a collaborator with opinions, not an executor with a ticket queue
• Mentorship — make the engineers around you meaningfully better, including senior engineers, through code review, design feedback, and direct investment in how they think through problems
• Process and Craft — when the org's ways of working have gaps, you fix them, not just flag them

Requirements:

• You are a Staff Software Engineer with 10+ years building and shipping production systems at scale — you own outcomes across teams, not just your slice of them
• You've already set the bar on a team for how AI gets used in real engineering work — not just used the tools yourself, but shaped how others do
• You have the judgment to know when to trust AI output and when to throw it out, and you help the engineers around you build that same calibrated view
• You move on hard, ambiguous problems without waiting for perfect information — you make the call, document your reasoning, and pull in the right people at the right moment
• You have deep backend fundamentals and system-design range — you've shipped production Rails, or you've shipped Python/Django or Node.js and you're ready to ramp up on Rails as fast as possible
• You have strong opinions about product and architecture decisions — you work with product and design as a peer, push back when the technical tradeoffs are being underweighted, and you're who others look to when the call is hard
• You communicate clearly and concisely — you can take a complex technical bet and make it land with engineers and execs alike
• If your best work happens inside one well-scoped team with clear requirements, this will be a stretch — Staff here own ambiguous, cross-team problems from start to finish
• You naturally reach for AI in your work — at Babylist, every team uses AI daily. You're already using it to move faster and improve your output, and you stay curious about what's coming next