Rapid7 - Staff Software Engineer - Java/Python

Description :

Staff Software Engineer (Java, Python)

About the Role :

The Staff Engineer is a recognized leader in the organization, responsible for driving the technical strategy and execution of critical, high-scale systems. This role operates with high technical autonomy, focusing on solving problems that cross team and organizational boundaries and ensuring the platform can scale to meet the company's long-term needs.

In this role, you will :

- Define and drive the multi-year technical roadmap and architecture for a major platform component or domain, anticipating future scaling, performance, and security requirements.

- Act as the expert technical consultant and decision-maker for complex architecture choices, balancing trade-offs between performance, cost, and development speed.

- Lead the design and implementation of large-scale distributed systems, leveraging expert-level knowledge of Core Java to build robust, high-throughput, and low-latency services.

- Identify opportunities for significant architectural simplification or refactoring that materially improves product reliability, developer velocity, or system performance.

- Mentor and coach engineers at all levels (SE I through SSE), raising the overall technical bar and promoting best practices across the organization.

- Collaborate closely with Product Management and Engineering leadership to translate business objectives into clear, executable technical strategies.

The skills youll bring include :

- A minimum of 8+ years experience in software development, with demonstrated mastery of Core Java and its ecosystem, including deep knowledge of distributed systems in a Core Java environment.

- Expert-level understanding of the JVM, including advanced garbage collection tuning, memory management, and performance diagnostics.

- Proven Ability to work in Python to solve complex problems, or a strong track record of quickly adopting and leveraging new languages/technologies like Python for strategic initiatives, tooling, or data processing.

- Extensive experience designing and operating mission-critical services on Cloud Infrastructure such as AWS / GCP / Azure, including experience with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, CloudFormation).

- Deep expertise in architectural patterns for large-scale distributed systems (e.g., event-driven architecture, microservices, consensus protocols, large-scale data storage/processing).

- Demonstrated experience leading technical strategy and large, complex projects that span multiple engineering teams.

- Exceptional communication and influencing skills, capable of driving consensus on technical decisions across organizational boundaries.

- Defines the technical direction for how the organization uses GenAI, ensuring it aligns with long-term product and engineering strategy.

- Architects scalable, reusable GenAI integration patterns, frameworks, or platforms that multiple teams can adopt.

- A track record of identifying technical debt, proposing solutions, and successfully driving major engineering initiatives to completion.