Staff Software Engineer

OpenMined is a nonprofit on a mission to build the public network for the world's non-public data. They are seeking a Senior / Staff Software Engineer to lead the Network Sourced AI squad, responsible for building core products that enable AI to query data live while maintaining attribution. The role involves hands-on technical leadership, architectural decision-making, and mentoring team members to deliver high-quality software.

Responsibilities:

• Own the NSAI squad technical architecture end to end — align design, engineering, and deployment across stack to deliver reliable technical capabilities and user experience from current implementation through product roadmap evolution
• Drive production readiness through deployment monitoring, error handling, graceful degradation, and operational runbooks
• Be a force multiplier by establishing, demonstrating, and mentoring the team to establish norms around engineering best practices (including system design for modularity, security, reliability, & scalability), code quality, and delivery to production
• Collaborate on core technology stack strategy through architectural review and identification of NSAI components that should become shared organizational primitives and defining standard interfaces that prevent tight coupling
• Partner with product lead to develop and execute on realistic roadmaps that balance what is desired with what is feasible, scalable, and architecturally sounds
• Own the delivery of engineering’s quarterly goals, ensuring consistent, high-impact delivery while effectively managing resources
• Own team output, delivery, and success (productivity, timeliness, morale) through appropriately matching team members and work to properly balance interest, learning opportunities, capacity, and capability
• Champion high-quality software delivery through the establishment of robust tools, processes, & methodologies, and by providing hands-on technical leadership via individual development contributions and code reviews
• Create technical documentation and processes that support high velocity and knowledge transfer
• Manage a team of 2-4 engineers as a people leader, performing 1:1s, providing technical and professional feedback, creating professional development plans, and performing performance reviews

Requirements:

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience with a track record of personally building, shipping, and operating production systems at meaningful scale
• Strong Python proficiency — FastAPI, async patterns, Docker orchestration
• Distributed systems and API design experience including design & evolution of interfaces consumed by multiple independent teams
• Practical RAG and information retrieval experience with vector databases, retrieval pipelines, embedding strategies, and aggregation
• Demonstration of technical leadership through the introduction of engineering quality practices to one or more teams
• Comfort with ambiguity and resource constraints
• Async-fluent with strong written communication and capacity to build high-trust working relationships across 6hr+ time zone spread
• Cross-functional collaboration & communication to facilitate and improve understanding/context sharing between engineers and non-engineering/non-technical stakeholders
• Located within ET +/- 1 to enable rapid team-oriented communication, learning, and feedback cycles as well as facilitate engagement with remainder of OpenMined engineering team, globally
• Vue 3 / TypeScript, Rust / Tauri, or cross-platform desktop app experience extremely beneficial
• Networking/P2P application experience beneficial