Senior Staff Software Engineer

Dispel builds secure, private network infrastructure for critical industries, and they are seeking a Senior Staff Software Engineer to own the full arc of their most consequential technical initiatives. This role involves system design, complex problem solving, and cross-team technical leadership, ensuring high-quality software and infrastructure that meets customer needs.

Responsibilities:

• Own design, planning, estimation, testing, and coordination for team projects spanning multiple quarters
• Understand the broad architecture of Dispel's entire system — software, networking, cloud, and on-prem infrastructure — and produce comprehensive architecture diagrams, technical proposals, and design documents that clarify ambiguous problem spaces and earn stakeholder alignment
• Evaluate major architectural tradeoffs across performance, scalability, security, maintainability, and engineering velocity, with particular attention to network and infrastructure implications
• Deliver complex systems on time and on budget, taking personal responsibility for the risks associated with your team's work
• Debug and resolve the most difficult technical problems Dispel encounters, including issues that span software, infrastructure, and network layers
• Determine and own the testing strategy for your team, ensuring appropriate coverage and quality across all layers of the stack
• Write software that sets the quality standard — clear, maintainable, well-tested, and designed to last, regardless of the language or layer
• Coordinate with other teams on cross-cutting technical issues, including infrastructure, security, and network architecture
• Provide technical advice that shapes decisions across the engineering organization
• Identify and communicate technical risks early and drive mitigation across team boundaries
• Make other engineers better through substantive proposals, reviews, architectural guidance, technical documentation, and direct mentorship — leading projects with multiple contributors, keeping delivery on track, and raising the quality of every engineer's contribution
• Determine the methods and procedures used by your team and continuously improve them
• Communicate effectively within and outside of the engineering organization — from technical peers to executive stakeholders
• Actively work to refine your team's approach to security, reliability, privacy, and compliance — particularly as they relate to network infrastructure and cloud environments
• Champion operational excellence and ensure the systems your team ships are observable, maintainable, and resilient

Requirements:

• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience with a demonstrated track record of leading team projects involving multiple engineers
• Strong proficiency in software development across multiple languages and paradigms — you are effective in the languages your team uses and can pick up new ones as needed
• Comfortable using coding agents (e.g., GitHub Copilot, Claude Code) as part of your daily workflow — Addy Osmani's article Agentic Engineering roughly describes Dispels basic stance on AI usage by engineers
• Solid understanding of network architecture: routing, switching, VPN protocols, DNS, and firewalls
• Hands-on experience with cloud platforms — AWS and/or Azure — including networking constructs such as VPCs, subnets, security groups, transit gateways, and private endpoints
• Experience with on-premises virtualization: hypervisors (ESXi, KVM, Hyper-V, or similar), VM lifecycle management
• Demonstrated ability to own cross-team projects and navigate organizational complexity to deliver results
• Experience producing technical proposals, architecture documents, and system designs that inform and align diverse stakeholders
• Proven track record of setting team-level engineering standards and driving their adoption
• Deep understanding of distributed systems: databases, caches, queues, event-driven architectures, and cloud infrastructure
• Depending on your background you should have a deeper understanding of one or more of the following areas: Full Stack, Backend, DevOps, Networking
• Strong judgment around security, reliability, privacy, and compliance in production systems — ideally in regulated or security-sensitive environments
• Familiarity with compliance frameworks relevant to Dispel's customers: FedRAMP, SOC 2, IEC 62443, or similar