Staff Software Engineer, Platform

Sharp Performance is hiring a Staff Software Engineer to co-own and scale the core platform behind its 1-1 coaching marketplace. The role combines hands-on backend and platform engineering with technical direction, reliability and security improvements, and collaboration across engineering squads.

Responsibilities:

• Co-own the architecture and long-term health of our core platform: a Laravel monolith with its database, API, background jobs, and internal admin tooling
• Build platform foundations other squads rely on: stable APIs and contracts, CI/CD, environments, feature flags, observability, and on-call readiness
• Lead scaling work end to end. Find the bottlenecks in the database, queues, caching, and third-party integrations, then fix them before customers feel them
• Decide where the monolith should stay a monolith and where a service, queue, or event boundary actually pays off. Write the doc, make the call, and land the migration safely
• Make the platform agent-ready: well-bounded modules, fast CI, reliable test environments, and safe, auditable access for agents to the evidence they need
• Harden reliability and security as we grow: multi-tenant data isolation, access controls, audit trails, and incident response that holds up to SOC 2
• Collaborate with C-Squad engineers. Review designs and code, mentor, unblock, and keep the squad's output coherent
• Work with product and the other squads on roadmap trade-offs, especially when platform work competes with feature work

Requirements:

• 8+ years building and running production backend systems, with recent time at staff or lead level
• A product mindset. You care as much about what we build as how we build it. You ask “why” early, push back when something doesn't serve users, and work with product and design to shape the roadmap, not just execute it
• Deep platform engineering experience: you've owned the infrastructure, deploy pipeline, and runtime of a growing product, not just features on top of it
• A track record of scaling a system through real growth. You can tell us what broke, how you found it, and what you changed
• Strong relational database skills (MySQL or PostgreSQL): schema design, query tuning, indexing, migrations on live data
• Hands-on with cloud infrastructure (AWS preferred), containers, infrastructure as code, and CI/CD
• Experience with async and distributed patterns: queues, workers, webhooks, idempotency, retries
• Comfort leading through influence. You've set technical direction for a team and brought people along
• Daily, hands-on use of AI coding agents. You know where they help, where they fail, and how to review and de-risk what they produce
• Experience building agent tooling or harnesses: skills, MCP servers, eval loops, or guardrails for agents touching production systems
• Clear written communication. You write design docs people actually read, and you explain trade-offs to engineers and PMs alike
• Experience breaking up or modernizing a monolith without a big-bang rewrite
• Observability tooling (Sentry, Datadog, or similar) and running incident response
• SOC 2/HIPAA or other compliance work in a production environment
• Integrations with scheduling, calendar, SMS, or email providers at volume