Staff Software Engineer - Tech Lead

Cerby is a mission-critical cybersecurity company that empowers teams to operate securely and control their apps. The role is responsible for providing technical direction, ensuring delivery excellence, and raising engineering standards within a product squad.

Responsibilities:

• Own the technical direction of your squad’s roadmap
• Design scalable, reliable, and maintainable system architectures
• Make key technical decisions balancing speed and long-term sustainability
• Lead technical discovery and solution design for complex initiatives
• Drive refactoring and tech debt prioritization as part of our ongoing operations
• Champion the adoption of AI-augmented development practices, leveraging emerging tools to automate rote processes and provide data-driven insights that enhance team skill sets and maximize delivery velocity
• Translate and collaborate on the product requirements to have clear technical plans
• Collaborate in break down large initiatives into actionable deliverables within the sprint
• Scope complex tasks and coordinate team efforts, proactively identifying and removing blockers to maintain delivery velocity
• Identify and evaluate risks early and proactively mitigate, and document them
• Ensure predictable delivery and alignment with OKRs
• Improve development workflows and engineering velocity
• Act as a technical mentor and coach to engineers
• Lead code reviews, promote best practices, and use AI tools to improve them
• Foster a culture of ownership, accountability, and continuous improvement
• Collaborate closely with the Engineering Manager on team health, processes, and performance
• Partner with Product Managers to shape technical feasibility
• Align with other Tech Leads to maintain architectural consistency
• Communicate trade-offs clearly to non-technical stakeholders

Requirements:

• 6+ years of software engineering experience
• Experience leading technical initiatives end-to-end
• Strong system design and architectural thinking
• Experience working in product-led companies
• Ability to balance short-term delivery with long-term scalability
• Strong communication skills (technical and non-technical audiences)
• Experience in high-growth or scaling environments (Series A/B/C preferred)
• Backend programming languages: Python, Go, or equivalent
• Experience with designing, developing, and maintaining scalable SaaS applications in a high-performance startup environment (prior experience in high-growth venture-funded SaaS startups preferred)
• Deep understanding of authentication and authorization protocols: OIDC (OpenID Connect), SAML, and SCIM
• Strong knowledge of identity and access management (IAM) concepts, including RBAC and ABAC
• Expertise in API security best practices and secure coding principles
• Solid understanding of web security vulnerabilities and mitigation strategies (CORS, XSS, CSRF, etc.)
• Knowledge of token-based authentication systems, including JWT implementation and security considerations
• Experience with session management and secure authentication flows
• Prior cybersecurity experience is a plus
• Cloud platforms (ideally AWS) and prior experience building scalable cloud-based systems
• Queuing, Messaging and Streaming platforms such as SQS
• Distributed data stores (S3), plus relational databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL), and key/value databases (Redis, DynamoDB, or similar)
• Software engineering practices such as Iterative Development, CI/CD, Collective Code Ownership, and Refactoring
• Architecting and designing modular and decoupled software applications and systems
• Designing distributed, fault-tolerant, high-availability, and resilient systems
• Proven ability to instrument distributed systems with well-designed telemetry and observability code (prior experience with Open Telemetry and Datadog a plus)
• Prior experience in high-growth venture-funded SaaS startups preferred
• Experience scaling systems for growth
• Experience mentoring engineers
• Experience working with distributed teams