Senior Staff Software Engineer

About the Role 

Bluestaq is seeking a Senior Staff Software Engineer to lead multi-team technical initiatives, influence architecture across product lines, and drive significant improvements in systems, engineering practices, and team capability. You'll operate at the intersection of technical leadership and organizational impact, harmonizing engineering patterns and shaping how Bluestaq builds mission-critical software at scale in support of national security and defense missions. 

Why This Role Matters 

Senior Staff Software Engineers are the connective tissue across engineering at Bluestaq. You don't just own a system—you influence how multiple teams build their systems. The platform improvements you drive, the standards you establish, and the coaching you provide to Staff and Senior engineers produce compounding effects on delivery speed and quality across the organization. Your decisions directly affect the reliability, security, and scalability of the software Bluestaq's customers and mission partners depend on. 

Key Responsibilities 

• Lead engineering efforts that span multiple teams or product areas, including major re-architectures, new platform capabilities, and cross-cutting reliability or security programs 
• Serve as a key technical partner for program leadership, product management, and cross-functional leads 
• Design and drive implementation of large-scale architectures: platform components, shared libraries, major system migrations, and cross-product integrations 
• Apply deep expertise across the full stack—backend, frontend, data, and infrastructure—to navigate complex performance, scalability, reliability, and security tradeoffs 
• Drive improvements in core engineering practices across multiple teams: testing strategy, observability, CI/CD pipelines, coding standards, and security posture 
• Identify and reduce unnecessary technical fragmentation by harmonizing patterns, tooling, and shared standards across engineering groups 
• Own cross-team technical outcomes with minimal direction, anticipating long-term risk and downstream impact before they become urgent 
• Coach Staff and Senior engineers to run their own domains effectively and grow into broader technical leaders 
• Represent engineering in high-level technical discussions about roadmap priorities, architectural tradeoffs, and organizational investment decisions 
• Lead multi-team initiatives from concept to rollout, aligning multiple engineering groups around shared goals and compatible designs 
• Recognize systemic weaknesses,test fragility, performance gaps, security posture, developer experience—and design programs to address them at scale 

Required Qualifications 

• Exceptional proficiency across multiple software engineering domains: distributed systems, API design, data architecture, frontend or backend development, and platform engineering 
• Demonstrated ability to lead multi-team technical initiatives from concept through production at organizational scale, with measurable impact on reliability, performance, or engineering velocity 
• Deep expertise in large-scale system design, platform architecture, and cross-cutting technical strategy spanning multiple stacks and deployment environments 
• Strong track record of driving cross-team engineering improvements in testing, observability, CI/CD, security, or shared infrastructure 
• Proven ability to identify and resolve systemic technical risks and fragmentation across multiple codebases and teams 
• Demonstrated success coaching and developing Staff-level engineers into broader technical leaders 
• Excellent technical communication skills: ability to influence and align multiple engineering teams behind shared architectural decisions, patterns, and standards 
• Experience navigating cross-team organizational dynamics and delivering technical outcomes across reporting boundaries without formal authority 

Preferred Qualifications 

• Experience designing or owning shared platforms, internal developer tooling, or cross-cutting infrastructure components used across multiple product teams 
• Background in large-scale system migrations, performance engineering programs, or multi-year reliability initiatives 
• Deep familiarity with DoD, intelligence community, or federal software delivery and security standards including RMF, NIST 800-53, or STIG compliance 
• Experience managing architectural technical debt at scale and driving simplification programs across large, complex codebases 
• History of developing Staff-level technical talent through direct coaching, structured mentorship, or technical leadership programs 
• Contributions to engineering strategy, hiring, or technical community beyond immediate team scope 
• External recognition as a technical leader: publications, conference presentations, open-source project ownership, or standards contributions 

Required Experience and Education: 

• PhD in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field and 6+ years of software engineering or related experience, OR 
• Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field and 8+ years of software engineering or related experience, OR 
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field and 10+ years of software engineering or related experience, OR 
• Associate degree in a related field and 12+ years of software engineering or related experience, OR 
• High School Diploma/GED and 14+ years of software engineering or related experience. 

You use modern AI tools with judgment: integrating them into workflows where they're impactful, reviewing their outputs, and handling proprietary or sensitive data responsibly.