Staff Software Engineer

Come Near is a nonprofit organization focused on raising public conversations about Jesus through initiatives like the He Gets Us campaign. They are seeking a Staff Software Engineer to lead the technical design of a personalized digital engagement platform, ensuring reliability, scalability, and security while collaborating with various teams.

Responsibilities:

• Design and document end-to-end architecture spanning products, data platforms, and cloud infrastructure
• Define technical standards, API patterns, and integration contracts for both internal and vendor engineering teams
• Architect systems for reliability, scalability, observability, and operational resilience, including support for high-impact, high-traffic events and traffic spikes
• Review vendor designs, implementations, and code contributions for architectural quality, security, performance, and long-term maintainability
• Collaborate with the AI and data teams on personalization logic, event tracking, and pipeline architecture, with specific attention to how personal/sensitive user data is collected, stored, and used
• Set and enforce a practical security and data privacy baseline appropriate to handling sensitive personal data at scale
• Identify and mitigate architectural, security, operational, and vendor-related risks before they become delivery, reliability, or business issues
• Remain an active technical contributor by shipping critical code, prototyping architectural decisions before standardizing them, and leading through implementation rather than direction alone
• Make build-vs-buy and build-vs-vendor recommendations that balance technical quality, delivery speed, operational complexity, and cost
• Set the standard for technical documentation across the organization, including architecture decision records (ADRs), design documents, technical standards, and operational runbooks
• Advise the Sr. Engineering Manager and VP of Engineering and Analytics on architecture strategy, technical risk, platform evolution, and major technical investment decisions

Requirements:

• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience, including meaningful experience operating at the Staff Engineer, Principal Engineer, Architect, or equivalent level; education - at minimum a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related field required
• Deep expertise in modern web platform architecture, including frameworks such as Next.js or comparable technologies, API design, content platforms, and edge/CDN architecture, plus working knowledge of mobile platform architecture
• Strong cloud infrastructure expertise (AWS preferred), including identity and access management, resiliency patterns, autoscaling, observability, and cost optimization
• Experience owning infrastructure-as-code practices (Terraform or equivalent) and CI/CD systems, not merely consuming them
• Experience defining, improving, or scaling testing and quality strategies across unit, integration, and end-to-end testing
• Experience working alongside external agencies, vendors, or contractors in shared codebases and architectural environments, including reviewing and challenging technical decisions when necessary
• Experience designing, building, and operating highly scalable distributed systems with demanding reliability and performance requirements
• Able to influence internal engineers and external vendor teams without formal authority through technical expertise, sound judgment, and credibility
• Async-fluent and self-directed, capable of driving complex, multi-week technical initiatives with minimal oversight
• Strong technical writing skills, producing clear architecture decisions, design documents, implementation guidance, and review feedback
• Comfortable holding a technical line under pressure, pushing back when shortcuts introduce unacceptable long-term risk
• Pragmatic about tradeoffs, balancing engineering rigor with delivery realities in a lean, mission-driven environment
• Comfortable operating with ambiguity and incomplete requirements, bringing structure and clarity to loosely defined problems
• Demonstrates strong systems thinking, understanding how technical decisions affect reliability, security, maintainability, cost, scalability, and team effectiveness
• This role is required to sign the organization's Statement of Faith
• A personal relationship with Jesus and a passion for Come Near's mission
• A heart for service, humility, and collaborative leadership
• An initiative-taking, meticulous approach to planning and execution
• Experience architecting or operating large-scale data platforms, analytics infrastructure, or data-intensive systems
• Experience building, integrating, or shipping AI/ML-powered products and capabilities
• Familiarity with MLOps practices, including deploying, monitoring, and operating machine learning systems in production