Top Staff Software Engineer Jobs in Chicago, IL

Leads architecture and development of highly available, distributed backend systems supporting Airbnb’s AirCover insurance platform. Owns policy, coverage, enrollment, regional rules, experimentation, and scalable multi-region capabilities. Partners with product, data science, legal, and engineering teams; analyzes conversion data; ensures auditability, privacy, reliability, and data integrity; mentors engineers; and applies emerging technologies such as LLMs where beneficial.

Lead architecture and reliability for a high-scale alerting platform. Design rule-based, ML-driven, and correlated detection systems; own Kafka-based event delivery, webhook reliability, idempotency, and sustained-load performance. Transform security and network telemetry into topology and dependency models that support LLM-assisted investigation and remediation. Provide cross-team technical leadership, mentor engineers, and guide long-term platform strategy across multiple alerting teams.

Design and build the core vCluster Platform using Go and deep Kubernetes expertise. Own backend features end to end, from technical design through release, while solving complex systems architecture challenges involving networking, storage, isolation, and resource sharing. Contribute to open-source projects and the Kubernetes community, operate autonomously in a high-growth startup, and help define scalable Kubernetes multi-tenancy solutions.

Staff Backend Engineer responsible for building data and machine learning systems that provide competitive travel-market intelligence. The role involves setting technical strategy, designing APIs and backend architecture, prototyping solutions, partnering with product and ML engineers, conducting design and code reviews, driving engineering best practices, and mentoring junior engineers.

Staff Software Engineer responsible for architecting and delivering backend-focused member and care team experiences. The role partners with product and clinical teams, sets technical direction, builds scalable and secure systems, maintains high-quality tested code, mentors engineers, and guides architecture across the stack. Responsibilities include API design, cloud infrastructure, CI/CD, observability, and thoughtful use of AI-assisted development tools.

Develop and operate Airbnb’s large-scale cloud infrastructure platform, including Kubernetes, developer APIs and CLIs, autoscaling, capacity management, and cloud automation. Build secure, reliable, scalable, and highly available distributed systems using public cloud technologies. Optimize existing infrastructure, improve performance and operational efficiency, troubleshoot production systems, and collaborate across engineering teams and open-source communities.

Staff Software Engineer responsible for setting technical direction, architecting scalable distributed systems, shipping high-impact features, and building AI-powered tools for a virtual healthcare platform. The role includes mentoring engineers, partnering with product and clinical leadership, translating user needs into technical solutions, and guiding frontend and backend application development in a fast-paced startup environment.

Own and build Hercules’ billing, payments, subscriptions, usage-based billing, monetization, and commerce infrastructure. Integrate payment providers, support currencies and payment methods, and design reliable, low-latency systems with webhook processing, retries, reconciliation, and scalable usage metering. The role requires strong system design, architecture, data modeling, API design, code quality, product judgment, and proficiency with Hercules’ TypeScript-based stack, including React, Postgres, Redis, containers, and Temporal.

Lead development of Hercules's AI-focused platform-as-a-service, including its database-like object model, backend services, APIs, SDKs, hosting infrastructure, and distributed systems. Build reliable, scalable, multi-tenant services with strong isolation, observability, resilience, low latency, and high throughput. Apply advanced Rust, data systems, architecture, API design, performance optimization, and AI-assisted development skills.

Own growth across the customer journey, including landing-page conversion, activation, paid conversion, retention, expansion, and monetization. Build and optimize product experiences, run A/B experiments, analyze results with SQL, and identify high-impact revenue opportunities. Develop scalable software using TypeScript, React, Postgres, Redis, and related technologies while applying AI to accelerate engineering workflows.

Lead end-to-end delivery of software products and complex subsystems across multiple platforms. Define engineering practices, influence solution architecture, and oversee CI/CD, DevOps, source control, testing, code quality, and environment management. Provide technical leadership through hiring, mentoring, collaboration, conflict resolution, and culture development. Drive continuous improvement, root-cause problem solving, documentation review, and delivery of incremental customer value.

Build and own full-stack features across Hercules’s AI agent, app builder, hosting infrastructure, SDK, platform, and internal AI coding harness. Design scalable systems, APIs, data models, and SaaS capabilities including billing, identity, analytics, and notifications. Write maintainable code in monorepos, ship customer-facing features independently, and work with TypeScript, React, Postgres, Redis, Temporal, cloud infrastructure, and AI development tools.

Build and own user-facing frontend interfaces across AI agents, app-building tools, mobile PWA experiences, and marketing pages. Responsibilities include frontend architecture, system design, data modeling, API design, maintaining high-quality monorepo code, independently shipping customer features, and delivering polished UX/UI. The role requires strong TypeScript and React expertise, familiarity with AI coding workflows, and ideally experience with containers, Postgres, and Redis.

Build and maintain scalable infrastructure for AI agents, app building, hosting, SDKs, and an enterprise platform. Design distributed, multi-tenant, data-intensive services; develop clean, maintainable code in monorepos; and independently ship customer-impacting changes. The role uses TypeScript, React, containers, Postgres, Redis, Temporal, and related cloud and AI technologies. Candidates should demonstrate strong system design, architecture, data modeling, API design, product sense, and advanced AI-assisted development skills.

Build and own user-facing features across Hercules’ AI Agent, App Builder, SDK, mobile app, and platform. Design scalable systems, APIs, data models, and high-quality code in a monorepo. Ship SaaS capabilities such as billing, analytics, feature flags, internationalization, and notifications. Apply strong product and UX judgment while working with TypeScript, React, Postgres, Redis, cloud infrastructure, and frontier AI coding tools.

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.

Provides architectural and technical leadership for institutional exchange systems, including matching engines, order management, market data, risk, and unified trading platforms. Leads ultra-low-latency distributed-system design, cross-team technical alignment, reliability standards, incident response, and multi-quarter initiatives. Maintains hands-on engineering contributions while mentoring senior engineers and developing technical leadership across teams.

Staff Software Engineer leading hands-on full-stack development across C#/.NET services, Angular interfaces, databases, and AWS-hosted applications. Builds healthcare data integrations using HL7, FHIR, and X12 EDI; modernizes legacy systems; improves performance; applies secure coding and HIPAA practices; supports production incidents; reviews code; mentors engineers; and collaborates with product and QA teams.

Lead architecture and roadmap for a company-wide data lakehouse platform. Build platform-as-product components (SDKs, CLIs, control planes), optimize distributed compute/storage, prototype performance R&D, ensure compliance-by-design (lineage, PII masking, access control), enable real-time AI data ingestion, drive engineering standards, and mentor cross-functional teams.

Design, build, and scale backend services, APIs, and workflow systems supporting healthcare claims identification and recovery. Integrate AI/ML models, legal datasets, and transactional data while developing fault-tolerant Temporal workflows. Maintain AWS infrastructure and secure deployment pipelines using Python, TypeScript, PostgreSQL, Redis, and related technologies. Collaborate with product, business, and data science teams to deliver reliable, secure, high-performance systems in a regulated startup environment.

Leads technical vision and strategy for Affirm’s Marketplace, Search, Ads Platform, and consumer experiences. Designs scalable full-stack platforms, guides architecture and technical excellence, coordinates initiatives across engineering teams, mentors engineers, and drives reliable delivery of customer-focused products across iOS, Android, and Web.

Build and modernize Carrum Health’s data platform by developing Python and SQL pipelines, AWS services, Terraform infrastructure, dbt transformations, observability, testing, and CI/CD. Automate carrier integrations, reduce operational toil, improve reliability, and support Databricks adoption. Extend AI-assisted ingestion and classification using Bedrock and collaborate across engineering, analytics, data science, and client-facing teams. The role includes production ownership, incident response, technical documentation, and healthcare data platform development.

Staff-level platform engineer to improve and scale inherited Scala systems, redesign data layers for ML/AI, build a Rust service framework, enhance observability and resilience, shape developer tooling and standards, and work across JVM, Rust, Python, SQL, and Spark.

Architect and build a high-performance trading platform for active traders. Develop responsive web interfaces integrating real-time market data, low-latency execution workflows, and advanced trading tools. Collaborate with cross-functional engineering teams on large-scale initiatives, emphasizing scalability, performance, API quality, maintainability, developer experience, and end-user usability.

Own and evolve patient-facing clinical application surfaces, including a React widget, clinician portal, and Python service layer. Lead full-stack architecture, AI application integrations, encounter data flows, internal tooling, versioned shared components, and operational reliability. Partner with AI engineers on LLM-enabled workflows, maintain dependencies, protect consumers from breaking changes, and mentor junior engineers. The role requires durable ownership of rapidly built systems and delivery of critical healthcare technology.