Top Staff Software Engineer Jobs in Chicago, IL

Lead technical strategy and delivery for mobile app infrastructure, owning shared components (design system, networking, CI/CD, observability, releases, tooling). Collaborate cross-functionally, set code/design standards, ensure operational readiness and on-call processes, mentor engineers, and drive large, business-impacting projects and migrations across the JS↔native boundary.

Lead design, build, and deploy scalable, reliable Java-based microservices in a cloud-native, event-driven AWS environment. Own backend feature design, code quality, automated testing, and FedRAMP release processes. Mentor engineers, participate in on-call/TechOps, integrate AI tools into development, and drive architecture, observability, and cross-team initiatives.

Lead technical strategy and execution for a backend ledger team building highly available, audit-grade financial systems. Drive architecture, reliability, monitoring, on-call practices, code quality, cross-functional collaboration, and mentoring to ensure accurate, scalable ledger operations.

Design, build, deploy, and operate a high-concurrency, resilient configuration and publishing platform. Lead cross-team projects, set technical direction, improve engineering productivity, optimize performance, and maintain end-to-end ownership of distributed systems at scale.

Lead the Mapping Engineering team as a Staff Software Engineer, focusing on designing scalable distributed backend systems for autonomous vehicle mapping, collaborating with cross-functional teams, and mentoring engineers.

As a Staff Software Engineer, you will define technical strategy for Drive-Thru solutions, standardize Android practices, and ensure seamless integration between mobile clients and backend services while mentoring peers.

The Staff Software Engineer will lead full-stack initiatives, improve system quality, drive technical direction, and mentor peers in a collaborative environment.

Drive the Continuous Integration team, ensuring build systems' reliability and scalability, and mentor CI engineers while improving developer productivity through automation and tooling.

Drive technical strategy and roadmap for Affirm's Online Storage platform. Design and build multi-region, highly available datastore solutions and control planes for hundreds of databases. Automate schema migrations, disaster recovery, sharding, and performance tuning. Collaborate with product, SRE, and infrastructure teams, own operations and on-call readiness, and mentor engineers while setting code and design standards.

Lead and set technical strategy for the Order Platform powering post-checkout flows (orders, captures, refunds, settlement). Design and ship highly available backend systems, own reliability/operational practices, mentor engineers, collaborate cross-functionally, and drive long-term technical decisions and execution plans.

Lead architecture and hands-on development of the end-to-end video pipeline (live ingest, transcoding, storage, playback, and developer SDKs). Mentor engineers, collaborate across mobile/web/ML/platform teams, own monitoring and on-call support, and help scale video streaming and VoD capabilities for millions of streams and clips.

Lead technical vision and implement high-impact Ruby on Rails solutions for an internal demo platform. Improve reliability, observability, instrumentation, and integrations; partner with Product, Sales, and cross-functional teams; mentor engineers and drive architecture, testing, and engineering best practices.

As a Staff Software Engineer, you will enhance platform engineering by improving deployment strategies and developer experiences, establishing reliable systems and mentorship across teams.

Lead technical strategy and execution for multi-quarter initiatives; build and maintain AI-driven systems; mentor and raise the technical bar across teams; collaborate cross-functionally; ensure data security and HIPAA-compliant practices; operate in an AWS + Kubernetes environment while introducing new technologies as system load grows.

Lead technical strategy and architecture for Coinbase's Blockchain Platform, overseeing nodes, indexers, wallets, and asset lifecycle. Drive cross-team platform rearchitectures, enforce security and reliability standards, champion AI-driven automation, use observability to improve reliability, and represent the platform to executives to secure alignment and resources for large-scale blockchain infrastructure initiatives.

Define and drive Payments technical strategy and architecture for rails, routing, and funds-flow systems. Lead large cross-team initiatives, ensure financial correctness, improve reliability and cost via observability, mentor senior engineers, and align stakeholders across product, risk, and regulatory teams.

Lead design and implementation of Affirm's Lakehouse Platform using Iceberg, Spark, Snowflake, and cloud storage. Drive platform roadmap, governance, access controls, performance and cost optimization, analytics engineering best practices, observability, and on-call readiness. Partner cross-functionally, mentor engineers, and build scalable, secure, self-service data infrastructure and semantic/agentic data tools.

Design, build, and operate low-latency authentication and authorization services (OAuth, sessions, tokens, 2FA, account recovery). Lead technical designs, ensure strong security and observability, collaborate cross-functionally, simplify integrations, and mentor engineers while running production services with measurable SLOs.

Lead design and implementation of Headway's insurance systems (eligibility, pricing, matching, claims). Build data-intensive, ML-powered platforms and automation, mentor engineers, write high-impact code, and improve accuracy and reliability across state and payer complexity to scale insurance-covered therapy.

The Staff Software Engineer will lead the architecture of the FCM platform, ensuring financial correctness and system integrity, while modernizing systems and improving operational tooling.

Lead technical strategy and architecture for Affirm Bank's cloud, data, vendor integrations, and operational tooling. Design, build, and operate high-stakes systems end-to-end, own incident response, vendor selection, and the Bank↔Affirm Inc integration boundary. Ensure examiner-ready documentation, compliance, reliability, and observability while mentoring engineers and pushing AI-assisted engineering practices to increase velocity and product safety.

Lead backend engineering for cloud-native, event-driven data pipelines and customer integrations (especially EHRs). Evolve core data models and APIs, improve scalability and reliability, mentor engineers, define best practices, and drive end-to-end testing and AWS-based solutions.

This role involves leading web platform initiatives, mentoring senior engineers, architecting web applications, and implementing technical strategies for improved performance.

Build a high-performance, low-latency Rust backend and core AI platform for an AI-native trading experience. Implement streaming responses, tool orchestration, caching, secure APIs (auth, rate limits, auditing, tracing), and safe trading action infrastructure (previews, confirmations, idempotency, audit logs). Partner with product and frontend to enable AI-native UX and translate business domain requirements into secure, resilient platform primitives.

Hands-on technical leader for the iOS mobile app: define architecture and engineering standards, own iOS CI/CD and releases, improve observability and security, integrate push/identity/deep links, mentor distributed iOS teams, collaborate with backend/product, and support production incident response and hotfixes.