Top Remote Staff Software Engineer Jobs in Chicago, IL

Design, develop, and maintain Scala/Akka-based low-latency trading systems on Kubernetes/GCP. Architect scalable, resilient backend services, integrate market data feeds, implement monitoring/observability, troubleshoot distributed systems and networking, and deliver end-to-end production software collaborating with product and engineering teams.

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 architect and develop high-performance cloud services, resolve infrastructure bottlenecks, ensure engineering best practices, and mentor junior members.

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.

Architect and build LLM-based, agentic AI systems and production pipelines (RAG, orchestration, memory, tool integration). Lead cross-functional delivery across frontend, backend, and ML, drive tooling/infrastructure choices, mentor engineers, and ensure scalable, observable, production-ready GenAI features.

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

The role involves providing technical leadership, hands-on execution, and cross-team influence in software engineering, focusing on solutions for scaling and performance challenges while using AI tools.

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.

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 design and implementation of the ISPM product using Ruby on Rails. Build scalable data pipelines and systems to process large-scale identity telemetry, collaborate with security researchers and product teams, mentor engineers, and set architectural direction for detection and remediation features.

Build and lead development of the ESPM platform using Ruby on Rails. Define technical vision, design scalable data pipelines and architectures for petabyte-scale ingestion, implement features across the stack, collaborate with security researchers, mentor engineers, and ensure high-quality, tested deliveries.

Own technically complex, mission-critical areas and define technical strategy for new products. Design and ship full‑stack, AI‑driven features end‑to‑end, build scalable data ingestion and API systems, partner with product/design/customer teams to translate ambiguous problems into measurable outcomes, mentor engineers, and raise engineering quality and standards across the organization.

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 delivery of large-scale distributed systems for Catering & Events. Own architecture, drive technical strategy, mentor engineers, collaborate with Product and Design, ensure scalability, reliability, observability, and champion AI adoption to improve developer productivity and product capabilities.

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.