Staff Software Engineer

WME is building internal platforms that support relationships, deals, and opportunities across the global entertainment industry. The Staff Software Engineer will own a major platform area across multiple teams, setting technical direction, managing roadmaps and risks, developing leads, hiring, and making architectural decisions.

Responsibilities:

• Own an area of the platform. You'll be responsible for the outcomes of one or more teams working across a connected set of product surfaces. Scope is assigned based on business need and shifts as the org grows
• Keep leadership ahead of risk. Your manager should hear about slippage, resourcing gaps, or a bad bet before they have to ask. That includes pushing back if a timeline isn't realistic, or a product ask will create debt worth knowing about. Raising risk early is never treated as a failure here
• Give your teams context. Engineers in your area should understand why a priority exists, why a tradeoff was made, and why something changed. You're the connection between company direction and day-to-day execution
• Own technical health. Staffing mix, delivery pace, product alignment, and architectural direction all sit with you. A team can be fully staffed and shipping quickly while quietly accumulating problems, so tracking velocity isn't the same as setting the technical bar — you're responsible for both
• Own the roadmap. You should be able to articulate what your area is building over the next quarter and defend the sequencing on your own
• Grow leads. Identifying and developing engineers who can own execution is a core part of the job, not a side effect of it
• Hire. You'll source and interview for your own teams and weigh in on candidates joining them
• Partner with a technical program manager. You'll work alongside a TPM who runs planning cadence, cross-team dependencies, and operational execution. You set the direction and make the calls; they keep the machinery of delivery running, so you're not absorbed into it
• Make architectural calls. Including the uncomfortable ones. You decide where to take on debt and where to pay it down, rather than letting either drift by default
• Shape architecture beyond your own area. You'll work with engineering leadership and peer Staff Engineers on overall system architecture and the shared components that cut across products

Requirements:

• Experience owning outcomes across multiple teams or workstreams at once, through leads rather than direct execution
• A track record of surfacing risk early and pushing back constructively on unrealistic scope or timelines
• Experience growing engineers into technical leadership
• Comfort owning a roadmap and defending its prioritization
• Hiring and interviewing experience
• Comfort working where systems, processes, and org structure are still forming
• Extensive software engineering experience, typically 15+ years
• Strong full-stack background building modern web applications, with deep proficiency in React, TypeScript, and Next.js
• Solid backend experience with Node.js, building scalable services and APIs (REST and gRPC)
• Experience designing and managing relational databases, particularly PostgreSQL
• Containerized workloads with Docker and Kubernetes, and infrastructure as code with Terraform
• Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines and developer tooling (GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps, or similar)
• Strong product instincts and a collaborative mindset
• Experience with cloud infrastructure; Azure preferred, including cloud-native services such as serverless functions, managed databases, queues, and blob storage