Staff Software Engineer - Authentication

Pindrop is a cybersecurity company delivering continuous identity verification across voice, video, and digital interactions. The Staff Software Engineer will set the technical direction for Authentication’s cloud services and infrastructure behind Passport, leading complex initiatives involving architecture, migration, reliability, scalability, performance, and security. This individual contributor will also guide technical standards, incident response, cross-functional alignment, and engineering mentorship.

Responsibilities:

• Define and evolve the technical strategy and architectural direction for Passport's cloud services, spanning multiple subsystems and workflows
• Lead high-impact, ambiguous initiatives from problem framing and design through implementation, rollout, and operational follow-through, using Go and Python
• Set technical standards and reusable patterns for cloud-native services across AWS and GCP, including services such as Kinesis, DynamoDB, and S3, with a focus on reliability, scale, and secure production operation
• Make and communicate consequential tradeoffs involving reliability, scalability, latency, security, cost, and time to market
• Anticipate systemic risks, identify architectural gaps, and drive mitigation before they affect customers, delivery velocity, or operational stability
• Partner closely with software engineering, test engineering, research, product teams to align roadmaps and deliver new capabilities
• Lead technical reviews and facilitate alignment on complex design decisions, migration strategies, and ownership boundaries
• Participate in incident response for critical systems, translating operational learnings into durable improvements in alerting, runbooks, deployment quality, and service ownership, using modern observability tooling to reduce ticket volume
• Raise the effectiveness of engineers across the team through mentorship, code reviews, technical guidance, and hands-on collaboration
• Participate in the team's on-call rotation, including helping cover after-hours alerts as the team expands distributed support coverage

Requirements:

• 8+ years of professional software development experience building backend services and APIs, or equivalent practical depth
• Demonstrated Staff-level impact: leading significant technical initiatives across multiple services or domains and delivering measurable outcomes
• Strong hands-on experience with Go, Python, or similar languages, plus a deep foundation in data structures, algorithms, concurrency, and Linux-based development
• Deep experience designing and operating cloud-native systems in AWS or GCP, including managed services such as S3, DynamoDB, Kinesis, and IAM
• Proven ownership of highly available systems, including deployment, monitoring, troubleshooting, incident response, and operational improvement, using CI/CD, Docker, and Kubernetes
• Experience defining or influencing technical standards, architecture, or roadmaps across team boundaries
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to document decisions and build alignment among stakeholders with different priorities
• Experience with backend data stores and messaging technologies such as Redis, MySQL, RabbitMQ, and Elasticsearch
• Experience in authentication, identity, fraud prevention, or other security-sensitive product environments
• Strong observability practices across metrics, logs, and traces, with a track record of using them to drive production diagnostics
• Experience leading large-scale migrations, reliability programs, or cost and capacity optimization efforts
• Experience designing internal platforms, developer tooling, or reusable engineering patterns adopted by multiple teams
• Exposure to UI work or adjacent product experiences that connect backend systems to customer-facing workflows