Staff Software Engineer

What You’ll Do

As a Staff Software Engineer in our Product & Technology organization, you will help define and evolve the technical strategy and architecture of Strive’s platform, ensuring engineering decisions align tightly with our clinical and business goals. This is a senior, hands-on individual contributor role. You will take on the most complex and ambiguous technical problems, designing and building scalable, reliable, and secure software while balancing the need to maintain and scale existing systems with the need to deliver new capabilities for patients, clinicians, and partners. Your impact will extend well beyond the systems you build yourself. You will help teams make sound architectural decisions, establish reusable patterns and standards, address systemic technical risk, and mentor engineers across multiple teams, raising the bar on design, implementation quality, and cross-functional collaboration. This role reports to a Senior Engineering Manager or Director of Engineering.

The Day to Day

• Lead the technical strategy, architecture, and roadmap for one or more critical domains within Strive’s platform, grounded in our business objectives and long-term product vision.
• Design and deliver end-to-end solutions for complex, cross-team initiatives, from problem framing and architecture through implementation, rollout, and production operation.
• Stay hands-on in the code, writing high-quality, well-tested, observable software, especially where complexity, risk, or ambiguity calls for senior engineering leadership.
• Make pragmatic architectural tradeoffs that balance scalability, reliability, security, compliance, delivery speed, cost, and long-term maintainability, while keeping the platform simple for other engineers to build on.
• Design and evolve the APIs, services, data models, integrations, and distributed systems that support Strive’s products and healthcare operations.
• Partner with Product, Clinical, Data, Security, and Operations leaders to make sure we solve the right problems in the right order, with clear outcomes and measures of success.
• Identify systemic technical risks, architectural limitations, performance bottlenecks, and technical debt, and lead the work to address them.
• Establish reusable architectural patterns, reference implementations, and engineering standards that help teams build consistently and effectively.
• Drive platform-wide improvements in developer experience, reliability, observability, security posture, and performance that measurably improve how engineering delivers value.
• Provide technical leadership across teams by facilitating design and architecture reviews, guiding major engineering decisions, and unblocking teams through hands-on help.
• Participate in production support and incident response, helping teams find root causes and turn operational lessons into better architecture, tooling, and practices.
• Collaborate with Security and Compliance to ensure systems protect sensitive healthcare information and meet regulatory and organizational requirements.
• Mentor and coach engineers and tech leads through design discussions, code reviews, pairing, and day-to-day work, helping them strengthen their technical judgment and grow as owners of their domains.
• Evaluate emerging technologies, including AI-assisted engineering tools, and identify opportunities to improve developer productivity, software quality, and engineering effectiveness.
• Communicate engineering strategy, architectural decisions, risks, and tradeoffs clearly to technical and non-technical audiences, from engineering teams to executives.

Minimum Qualifications

• High school diploma or GED equivalent.
• 9+ years of combined related education, experience, or certification in software engineering or a closely related field, including substantial experience building and operating production software systems.
• Internet connectivity with minimum speeds of 3.8 Mbps up / 3.0 Mbps down and latency under 60 ms.
• Ability to travel and be onsite to meet business needs.

Preferred Qualifications

• Bachelor’s or advanced degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
• Proven experience as a senior individual contributor (e.g., Senior or Staff Engineer) leading the technical design and delivery of complex initiatives spanning multiple systems, domains, or teams.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals, including system design, API design, data modeling, testing, debugging, and production operations.
• Experience designing and building scalable, reliable, and maintainable cloud-based applications, services, and integrations.
• Experience with modern engineering practices such as CI/CD, infrastructure as code, automated testing, observability, and security by design.
• Demonstrated ability to make sound, autonomous technical decisions that align with company and department goals when requirements are incomplete or solutions are ambiguous.
• Experience troubleshooting complex production systems and participating in incident response and root cause analysis.
• Demonstrated ability to mentor engineers and influence technical direction without formal management authority.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to explain technical concepts and tradeoffs to technical and non-technical audiences.
• Experience building software in healthcare, health technology, value-based care, or another highly regulated environment, including systems that handle PHI or other sensitive data.
• Understanding of privacy, security, and compliance requirements (e.g., HIPAA) and experience building them into application and system design.
• Strong experience designing and scaling distributed systems, event-driven architectures, and data pipelines on AWS or a similar cloud platform.
• Familiarity with healthcare interoperability, clinical data, electronic health records, or standards such as FHIR and HL7.
• Experience with relational and non-relational data stores and systems processing significant volumes of operational or clinical data.
• Experience influencing engineering strategy beyond a single team, such as setting technical direction or establishing architecture, testing, observability, and operational standards across teams.
• Experience leading modernization efforts involving legacy systems, architecture evolution, or significant technical debt.
• Experience with AI-assisted software development tools, and with evaluating new technologies through prototypes, reference implementations, and incremental adoption.
• Exposure to kidney care, value-based care, or other complex clinical workflows.

About You

• You are a builder who enjoys designing systems, writing code, solving hard problems, and seeing your work run successfully in production.
• You are energized by ambiguous, high-impact problems and can turn loosely defined challenges into clear technical approaches, even where process and systems don’t yet exist.
• You pair broad knowledge of software engineering with deep expertise in one or more areas, and you use that breadth to weigh the organizational impact of technical choices.
• You have strong technical judgment and know that the best solution isn’t always the most complex one, or when a long-term platform investment is worth it versus a simpler approach.
• You balance short-term needs with long-term architectural investments and keep a clear view of tradeoffs and sequencing over time.
• You are an excellent systems thinker and communicator who explains decisions and the reasoning behind them, and proactively shares risks, tradeoffs, and progress.
• You raise engineering standards through influence, collaboration, and example rather than authority, and you enjoy helping others grow their skills and autonomy.
• You challenge assumptions constructively while staying open to different perspectives and new information.
• You take ownership of outcomes, including the reliability and maintainability of software long after it ships.
• You approach privacy, security, and risk thoughtfully because the systems you build support patients and clinicians, and you handle sensitive information with integrity and discretion.
• You are collaborative, low-ego, and motivated by the success of the broader team rather than ownership boundaries.
• You are outcome-driven and curious, using data, experimentation, and feedback loops, as well as thoughtful adoption of AI and other new capabilities, to keep improving the platform and how engineering works.

Annual Salary Range: $130,000 - $163,000. This position is also eligible for a target annual bonus of 15%