Top Staff Engineer Jobs in Chicago, IL

Provides technical leadership across teams by setting direction for complex systems, leading architecture and design, resolving ambiguous high-impact problems, and improving scalability, reliability, security, observability, developer experience, and engineering effectiveness. The role partners with product and engineering leaders, contributes hands-on to critical projects, mentors engineers, and influences outcomes without direct management authority.

Design and implement scalable, secure, high-performance software systems and public-facing APIs. Lead system design, apply agentic coding workflows, collaborate with Product and Data Science, mentor engineers, and own initiatives improving efficiency, performance, and customer satisfaction. The role requires extensive experience with highly available distributed systems, API versioning and rate limiting, modern backend and frontend technologies, AWS, and Domain-Driven Design.

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.

Designs and supports hybrid cloud networking infrastructure across Azure environments, including hub-and-spoke, Virtual WAN, VPN, ExpressRoute, routing, and DNS. Leads infrastructure automation, Infrastructure as Code, CI/CD, observability, governance, and security initiatives. Troubleshoots complex infrastructure issues, develops architecture standards, documents solutions, mentors engineers, conducts code reviews, and partners with technical and business stakeholders. Participates in on-call rotations and occasional after-hours deployments.

Own and evolve enterprise CI/CD release pipelines, with emphasis on continuous delivery, progressive rollouts, automated health checks, rollback, and multi-service releases. Lead Terraform and multi-cloud IaC architecture across AWS, Azure, and GCP, including reusable modules, state management, governance, security, compliance, and cost controls. Drive organization-wide IaC adoption, monitor deployments and infrastructure, respond to incidents, and mentor engineering teams.

Lead the technical direction and architecture of the Foundations platform team, owning authentication, authorization, SSO, secrets management, tenancy, and core platform services. Design APIs, drive services through launch, make technical decisions, establish engineering standards, and mentor engineers without formal management authority. Partner with engineering and product leaders to align execution with priorities.

Leads and contributes to the design, development, and delivery of scalable Java and Spring Boot software solutions. Designs microservices and APIs, supports cloud initiatives, creates proofs of concept, optimizes performance, conducts code reviews, resolves complex issues, and provides root-cause analysis. Collaborates with architects, business leaders, and engineering teams while mentoring junior developers and promoting technical best practices, quality, and innovation.

Lead the architecture and operation of Horizon3’s developer experience platform, including local development, CI/CD, build systems, container images, artifact promotion, release workflows, security gates, and delivery observability. Build reusable tooling and paved paths, establish secure AI-assisted development practices, improve reproducibility and supply-chain security, and mentor engineers. Partner across Platform, Security, QA, and application teams to drive adoption, reliability, delivery speed, and continuous improvement.

Architects and develops embedded firmware and core software for automotive real-time ECUs, including BSP drivers, AUTOSAR MCAL integration, RTOS, bootloaders, cybersecurity, and functional safety features. Leads technical development, supplier integration, debugging, requirements documentation, configuration management, and workflow automation. Requires strong experience with C, assembly, microcontrollers, memory systems, CAN protocols, firmware debugging, and automotive software standards.

Own and scale a multi-cloud data platform across AWS and Azure. Manage Apache Airflow, Kubernetes, Terraform, Helm, ArgoCD, CI/CD, observability, big data infrastructure, governance tooling, and FinOps initiatives. Provide end-to-end architectural and operational ownership, improve developer tooling, define platform roadmaps, manage incidents, enforce engineering standards, and mentor data platform engineers.

Build and maintain software for Ripple’s liquidity management solutions, supporting cryptocurrency-based financial infrastructure. The posting provides no specific responsibilities, technologies, qualifications, or experience requirements beyond the Staff Software Engineer title.

Lead backend architecture and platform modernization for Dealer Inspire. Design and build scalable, API-driven microservices, tooling, and observability. Mentor engineers, drive cross-team standards, improve developer experience, participate in on-call rotations, and modernize legacy systems to meet SLOs.

Drive technical direction and architecture across teams for enterprise retail software. Improve platform reliability and performance, scope customer-facing features, mentor engineers, de-risk large work, and embed AI-native practices (LLMs/agents) into engineering workflows.

Leads technical direction for Everand’s backend platform, including architecture, reliability, observability, CI/CD, databases, queues, and scalable distributed systems. Partners with product, design, analytics, web, mobile, and ML teams to deliver personalized reading and listening experiences. Mentors engineers, drives architecture reviews and modernization efforts, improves technical quality, and owns platform health, performance, cost, and resilience.

Leads cross-team backend initiatives and technical architecture for GitLab’s Core DevOps platform. Responsibilities include modernizing a monolith, establishing service, API, data, security, testing, and observability standards, guiding Go and Kubernetes practices, supporting Rust adoption, participating in incident response, mentoring engineers, reducing technical debt, and advancing AI-assisted engineering workflows.

Develop and integrate embedded C/C++ drivers, libraries, APIs, and applications for software-defined radio platforms. Build embedded Linux software, hardware interfaces, automated tests, and CI/CD workflows. Collaborate across software, FPGA, firmware, and hardware teams; investigate technical issues, conduct code reviews, document designs, improve development practices, and mentor junior engineers. Work includes Python-based test automation and signal-in-the-loop control of RF test equipment.

Build and maintain AWS-based DevOps infrastructure, CI/CD pipelines, containerized microservices, and Infrastructure as Code. Improve observability, resilience, security, compliance, and scalability through monitoring, vulnerability management, system hardening, and performance testing. Collaborate with development teams to resolve outages, contribute to architecture and software development, review code, document systems, mentor engineers, and participate in Agile ceremonies and on-call support.

Staff Software Engineer responsible for architecting enterprise platform services, REST APIs, microservices, event-driven systems, and cloud-native solutions on Azure or AWS. The role leads integration of agentic AI, LLMs, and MCP capabilities; shapes technical strategy; improves developer experience; mentors senior engineers; and establishes architecture standards, documentation, and responsible AI development practices across engineering teams.

Lead systems engineering for a next-generation unmanned aircraft system. Responsibilities include defining system architecture, behaviors, requirements, interfaces, fault responses, and traceability; integrating avionics, autonomy, propulsion, sensors, and mission systems; conducting MBSE modeling, trade studies, safety analyses, flight testing, and performance validation; and coordinating cross-functional teams, DoD stakeholders, and government partners through development and operational deployment.

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 software engineering for the Patient Onboarding team, building and improving registration, insurance verification, and care-access workflows. Write full-stack production code, lead complex cross-team initiatives, shape technical direction, improve engineering foundations, and support modern AI-enabled development practices. Collaborate with Product, Design, Analytics, and Engineering to improve patient conversion and system reliability.

Designs, builds, and scales backend services and integrations for payments, billing, identity, and partner connectivity. Sets technical vision and architecture for distributed systems, leads cross-team delivery, manages production rollouts, builds fault-tolerant services and data pipelines, and mentors engineers. The role partners with product, design, and engineering teams to deliver frequent, reliable improvements for Flex’s rent payment platform.

Build and own full-stack MarTech services, scalable APIs, event-driven systems, data pipelines, and customer-facing web experiences. Integrate advertising, analytics, messaging, and marketing platforms while supporting attribution, identity resolution, experimentation, acquisition, and retention. Collaborate cross-functionally with marketing, product, data, design, and engineering teams to launch measurable growth initiatives. Mentor engineers and establish technical best practices across high-scale marketing infrastructure.

Build, monitor, and scale resilient cloud infrastructure across multi-region and multi-cloud environments. Develop Kubernetes controllers and infrastructure tools using Go, Python, Ruby, and Terraform; maintain Datadog observability; diagnose complex production performance and reliability issues; automate failover and capacity management; and collaborate with engineering teams on architecture and infrastructure improvements.

Design and scale a feature flagging and A/B testing platform, including high-throughput event ingestion, warehouse-native analytics, real-time feature flag delivery, multi-database SQL support, and distributed systems infrastructure. The role involves full-stack development, architecture, performance optimization, reliability engineering, and technical product influence within a remote startup team.