Staff Engineer
Skills
Amazon Web ServicesElasticsearchPipelinesProduction SupportPythonShapingSpaces
What the job involves
The main requirements, responsibilities and hiring steps.
Requirements
- Commitment to Thorn’s mission and putting children served at the center of decisions
- Substantial experience building and operating backend services in production including Python
- Hands-on experience deploying or supporting production applications in Kubernetes
- Experience building and operating services in a production cloud environment
- Ability to contribute across unfamiliar parts of a codebase and learn quickly
- Strong architectural judgment and ability to consider broader system impact
- Comfort operating in ambiguous problem spaces and bringing clarity to complex technical challenges
- Pragmatic technical tradeoff skills balancing immediate needs and long-term maintainability
- Ability to influence technical decisions through clear articulation and collaboration
- Experience mentoring engineers and sharing technical standards
- Empathy for users and ability to balance product vision with engineering constraints
- Clear efficient thoughtful communication in a highly distributed team
Nice to have
- Autonomous
- Pragmatic
- Collaborative
- Mentoring-minded
- Adaptable
- Empathetic
Day to day
- Lead high-impact backend initiatives within the Safer product area to help build technology that detects and responds to child sexual abuse material on platforms.
- Design and deliver complex multi-system projects while anticipating technical risks and making sound architectural decisions that improve reliability performance and long-term sustainability.
- Collaborate closely with Product Build and engineering peers to translate broad goals into actionable plans troubleshoot production issues and strengthen code quality maintainability and operational excellence.