Top Staff Engineer Jobs in Chicago, IL

Lead technical vision and solutions as a domain expert: decompose complex problems, ensure design quality, optimize scalability/operability, mentor engineers, produce reusable artifacts, and drive engineering excellence across teams.

The Distinguished Engineer will lead technical vision in cloud banking, ensure system performance and scalability, mentor engineers, and drive AI-enabled engineering practices.

Leads technical vision and engineering excellence for a cloud-native global payments network. Designs and reviews resilient, secure, scalable, low-latency systems; decomposes complex problems; supports cloud modernization and new payment capabilities; mentors engineers; shares technical knowledge; and advises teams on architecture, performance, scalability, operability, and production-quality implementation.

Build and validate computational models of combustion, heat transfer, fluid flows, and fire/explosion scenarios using commercial CFD and FEA tools. Perform pre/post-processing, analyze results, document modeling approaches, run validation experiments, write technical reports, and communicate findings to internal and external stakeholders. Collaborate with industry and academics and present at conferences.

Provides hands-on technical leadership for mobile and terminal payment experiences. Defines architecture and long-term strategy across mobile apps, SDKs, payment terminals, and distributed backend systems. Leads complex reliability, performance, security, and compatibility initiatives; establishes APIs and integration patterns; aligns Product, Design, Legal, and external partners; mentors engineers; and advances observability, testing, and operational excellence.

As a Senior Staff Engineer at Braze, you will lead technical initiatives in the Channels division, ensuring effective message delivery, mentoring engineers, and enhancing architectural quality while actively contributing to software development.

Lead technical vision and architecture for a cloud-native, low-latency global payments platform. Decompose complex systems, ensure performance/scalability/operability, drive reusable solutions, mentor engineers, evangelize best practices, and apply advanced AI tooling to accelerate development.

Develop guidance, navigation, and control algorithms for advanced aircraft in a blue-sky defense project. Responsibilities include vehicle dynamics modeling, flight-control design, simulation, real-world control-system tuning and optimization, and applying modern control theory. The role requires strong aircraft dynamics and handling-qualities expertise, production C++ experience, and MATLAB/Simulink proficiency. Candidates must be able to obtain a Secret clearance and collaborate effectively in a fast-moving engineering environment.

Lead technical strategy and hands-on delivery for Card Acquisitions engineering. Drive reusable, modular platform capabilities, mentor engineers, design high-performance scalable systems, and partner with product teams to accelerate feature delivery across distributed cloud services and frontend experiences.

Lead technical strategy and hands-on delivery for Customer Management platforms, driving architecture, full‑stack development, SRE excellence, migrations, GenAI enablement, experimentation, and mentoring across large engineering organizations to improve credit offer and lifecycle experiences.

Lead architecture and implementation of high-throughput, low-latency global payment systems in the cloud. Drive technical vision, mentor engineers, evangelize AI-native patterns, remove technical debt, and partner with executives to deliver resilient, secure, and scalable payments infrastructure.

Lead technical vision and architecture for cloud-native, low-latency digital payments systems (tokenization, ApplePay/GooglePay). Design scalable, secure distributed platforms, mentor engineers, drive cloud modernization, adopt AI tooling, and ensure performance, operability, and engineering excellence across teams.

Lead design and implementation of the Tax platform: build scalable, fault-tolerant systems, improve extensibility, mentor engineers, drive technical strategy and roadmap, collaborate cross-functionally, improve reliability/incident response, and build AI guardrails to safely leverage agentic LLMs for tax compliance.

As a Principal Engineer, you will design, scale, and lead the development of Adyen's financial products while mentoring engineers and collaborating with product teams.

Lead the evolution of Adyen's merchant onboarding process by architecting systems that optimize activation and compliance, utilizing applied AI to automate merchant document interpretation and KYC processes.

Own and maintain native C++ build systems for autonomous aircraft. Improve developer velocity by reducing build/test cycle time, integrate CI with HIL and simulation, implement monitoring and alerts, troubleshoot build/test failures, and collaborate with engineers to design and deploy DevEx/DevOps solutions.

Design, develop, and field high-performance Ground Control Station and C2 software using C++/Qt/QML and QGroundControl. Lead architecture and technical direction, mentor engineers, define APIs/ICDs, debug integration/latency issues, support field tests, implement post-mission debrief tools, and ensure interoperability with C2 standards.

Lead survivability engineering for autonomous aircraft: design and optimize low-observable features, perform EM signature modeling and RCS testing, partner with multidisciplinary teams and materials scientists, translate threats into survivability requirements, and support assessments and milestone decisions throughout the program lifecycle.

Lead technical vision and software engineering excellence for Capital One’s Card Tech team. Build production-ready, AI-native systems; design distributed, scalable, fault-tolerant architectures and API platforms; ensure performance, security, and operability; decompose complex problems; mentor engineers; recruit talent; and share technical knowledge across the organization.

Architect and deliver scalable, secure systems across teams; solve complex cross-team problems; lead large technical initiatives; evaluate emerging technologies; mentor engineers; align technical direction with product and business outcomes while balancing performance, maintainability, and cost.

Design and extend actor-like programming notations and compiler toolchains for an event-driven graph accelerator. Implement code generation, register and locality management, data-movement optimizations, and performance profiling. Maintain and extend compiler frameworks (LLVM/GCC/MLIR) and optimize for parallelism, memory hierarchy, and specialized hardware.

Design, build, and maintain People systems automations and integrations (Workato, Workday, Greenhouse, Slack) using production-quality code. Improve CI/CD, reliability, observability, and AI-driven automation (Claude, MCP). Serve as technical lead for People Technology, partner with stakeholders, and drive scalable, maintainable automation solutions.

Lead the developer experience roadmap and own multi-language SDKs and the code-generation pipeline. Design CI, release automation, observability, and tooling (CLI, starter repos). Improve cross-language parity, docs, and developer onboarding; remove systemic friction and represent DX to Product, Engineering, and Partnerships.

Lead global lab technical expertise for datacenter power and cooling testing. Drive standardization, safety, training, and process improvements across labs. Advise on test methods, equipment, and staffing; partner with stakeholders to digitalize and automate testing, apply Lean principles, and develop competency criteria and training materials.

Design, build, operate, and own backend systems supporting order handling, ledgers, and settlement. Partner with product and cross-functional teams to scope and deliver features, provide technical leadership and mentorship, conduct high-quality code reviews, establish engineering standards, troubleshoot production issues, evaluate technologies, and participate in on-call operations.