Senior Software Engineer

Persona is a recruiting and staffing company that hires exceptional people from 98 countries into full-time, long-term remote roles with the most ambitious companies on earth. Fortune 500 enterprises, fast-growing startups backed by Sequoia, Founders Fund, and Andreessen Horowitz, and high-performing companies of every size in between. Project management, operations, finance, design, marketing, customer success, and more. Every hire is for a specific open position: one person, one dedicated client, built to last.

The bar is the highest in the industry. More than 200,000 people apply every month, and fewer than 1 in 2,000 are hired. Every offer we make is for an open role with a single client — the kind of role that's almost impossible to find on your own: industry-leading pay set against your experience and skill, real career growth, and a stable seat at a serious company, working from home, anywhere in the world.

Persona was founded in 2018 by two Stanford graduates on a simple idea: talent is everywhere, but opportunity isn't. By recruiting globally for specific client roles, we've grown into one of the fastest-growing companies in the global staffing industry.

We hire people who care about the craft of their work, take ownership without being asked, and want to build a career rather than just hold a job. If that's you, and one of our open roles fits, we'd like to meet you.

Role Summary

We are hiring a Senior Software Engineer to lead a small squad building production infrastructure at the intersection of distributed systems, RAG, and AI. This is a hybrid technical leadership and people management role: you will write code, own architecture decisions end-to-end, run code reviews, and manage 2-4 engineers, while also serving as the most senior technical voice on the team.

The work spans both a local-node application that runs on a data owner's machine and a network layer that lets external systems discover and query across those nodes in real time — meaning you'll move fluently between desktop, backend, and distributed-network problems. You bring the production muscle: instinct for what scales, judgment about what to build and what to kill, and the craft to raise the team's standard through pairing and example rather than mandates. Ideal candidates are senior engineers who have personally shipped and operated production systems at meaningful scale and are looking for technical leadership rooted in code, not in process.

Key Responsibilities

Technical Architecture & Production Quality

• Own the squad's technical architecture end-to-end across design, engineering, and deployment to deliver reliable capabilities and user experience

• Drive production readiness: deployment monitoring, error handling, graceful degradation, operational runbooks

• Identify components that should become shared organizational primitives; define standard interfaces that prevent tight coupling

• Partner with the product lead to develop and execute realistic roadmaps that balance what is desired with what is feasible, scalable, and architecturally sound

Hands-On Engineering Leadership

• Be a force multiplier: establish, demonstrate, and mentor the team in best practices for system design (modularity, security, reliability, scalability), code quality, and delivery

• Champion high-quality software delivery through hands-on contributions, code reviews, and architectural guidance — not mandates

• Create technical documentation and processes that support velocity and knowledge transfer across a distributed team

Team & Delivery Management

• Manage 2-4 engineers as a people leader: 1:1s, technical and professional feedback, development plans, performance reviews

• Own quarterly delivery goals; match team members and work to balance interest, learning, capacity, and capability

• Own team output, productivity, timeliness, and morale

Required Qualifications

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience with a track record of personally building, shipping, and operating production systems at meaningful scale

• Strong Python proficiency, including FastAPI, async patterns, and Docker orchestration

• Distributed systems and API design experience, including design and evolution of interfaces consumed by multiple independent teams

• Practical RAG and information retrieval experience: vector databases, retrieval pipelines, embedding strategies, and aggregation

• Demonstrated technical leadership: introduced engineering quality practices to one or more teams

• Comfort operating with ambiguity and resource constraints

• Async-fluent with strong written communication; able to build high-trust relationships across a 6+ hour time-zone spread

• Strong cross-functional collaboration with non-engineering and non-technical stakeholders

• Located within ET ±1 hour to enable rapid feedback cycles with a globally distributed engineering team

• Fully fluent in English

• Ability to commit long-term and full-time

Preferred Qualifications

• Vue 3 / TypeScript experience (extremely beneficial)

• Rust / Tauri or cross-platform desktop application experience (extremely beneficial)

• Networking, P2P, or federated application development experience

• Open-source contributions or maintainership

• Experience building developer-facing platforms, SDKs, or APIs

• Background in nonprofit, academic, or research-driven engineering organizations

• Experience with attribution, provenance, content licensing, or rights-management systems

• Familiarity with privacy-preserving computation or federated AI architectures

Tools & Technologies

• Python, FastAPI, async Python patterns, Docker, Kubernetes; Vue 3, TypeScript, Tauri, Rust (a plus); vector databases (Pinecone, Weaviate, Qdrant, pgvector), embedding frameworks, RAG pipelines (LlamaIndex, LangChain); CI/CD (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI); observability (Datadog, Sentry, OpenTelemetry); Linear or Jira, Notion, Slack, Loom

Core Competencies

• Senior engineer who leads by example, not by mandate

• Strong production instincts: knows what scales, what to build, and what to kill

• Force multiplier through pairing, mentorship, and code review

• Comfortable owning both architecture and people management

• Calm in ambiguity; thrives where no playbook exists

• Mission-driven; energized by building distributed systems that matter

• Strong async communicator across global time zones

• Excellent technical judgment under resource constraints

What We Offer

• Best salaries in the industry

• Work from anywhere permanently

• Opportunities for growth and advancement

• A fast-paced and collaborative environment

• A warm, people-first company culture

• Get paid in your currency of choice

• Full benefits

This is a full-time, long-term remote position dedicated to one client company. Persona provides onboarding and ongoing employment support for this position.