Senior Staff Software Engineer (Platform)

Join Sentry, a leading error tracking and performance monitoring platform. As a Senior Staff Software Engineer, you will set the technical direction for our Platform organization, leading engineering work across infrastructure, streaming, and storage. You will partner with engineering and product leaders to identify areas for platform evolution, make architectural decisions, and lead changes through production delivery. This role requires strong hands-on software engineering skills, deep experience in cloud environments, and the ability to mentor and guide other engineers.

• Set technical direction for platform initiatives spanning multiple teams, connecting architectural decisions to product needs and business priorities.
• Identify and lead changes addressing system bottlenecks, reliability risks, and architectural constraints, owning cross-team initiatives from problem definition to implementation.
• Mentor senior and staff engineers, strengthening their technical judgment and ability to lead across team boundaries, while staying hands-on through system design, prototyping, and code.

• Strong hands-on software engineering skills, including writing production code and building prototypes to validate architectural approaches
• Distributed storage and data systems, including OLAP/OLTP databases, blob storage, and caching
• Deep experience designing and operating production systems in cloud environments such as AWS or GCP, with ownership of architectural decisions and their operational outcomes
• You bring structure to ambiguous problems and help teams agree on what to solve first
• Proven experience setting technical direction across multiple engineering teams, aligning engineering and product leaders on architectural decisions, priorities, and tradeoffs
• You build alignment across teams, challenge assumptions, and make decisions when priorities compete
• You pair architectural judgment with hands-on engineering and ownership through delivery
• Ability to explain complex technical tradeoffs, build alignment across teams and senior leadership, and resolve architectural disagreements
• Deep expertise in one or more of the following areas, with working knowledge across others:
• 12+ years of software engineering experience, including substantial hands-on experience architecting, building, and operating large-scale distributed systems
• Experience mentoring senior and staff engineers, strengthening their architectural judgment, and developing technical leadership across teams
• You favor simple, maintainable designs and understand when added complexity is necessary
• Track record of leading complex, cross-team initiatives from problem definition through production delivery, with measurable improvements in reliability, scalability, performance, or engineering productivity
• Cloud infrastructure, container orchestration, and infrastructure as code, such as Kubernetes and Terraform
• Event streaming and real-time processing systems, such as Kafka, Flink, or Beam