Senior Staff Software Engineer, Platform

About the Role

A strong and reliable platform is essential to scaling Sentry for the future. Our Platform organization is responsible for everything that powers Sentry, from cloud infrastructure and streaming systems to storage, deployment, and security. We own the core services and technical foundations that enable every product and engineering team at Sentry to move fast and build with confidence.

We’re looking for a Senior Staff Software Engineer to set technical direction across Sentry’s Platform organization and lead engineering work spanning infrastructure, streaming, and storage.

Reporting directly to the VP of Platform Engineering, you’ll partner with engineering and product leaders to identify where our platform needs to evolve, make architectural decisions across team boundaries, and lead those changes through production delivery. You’ll stay hands-on through system design, prototyping, and code while helping senior and staff engineers lead work across teams.

What You’ll Do

• Set technical direction for platform initiatives spanning multiple teams, connecting architectural decisions to product needs and business priorities.
• Identify and lead changes addressing system bottlenecks, reliability risks, and architectural constraints.
• Own cross-team initiatives from problem definition and design through implementation, rollout, and evaluation.
• Make tradeoffs across reliability, performance, cost, operational complexity, and delivery speed.
• Stay hands-on where your contribution matters most, writing code, building prototypes, and helping teams resolve difficult implementation problems.
• Partner with engineering and product leaders to prioritize platform investments and sequence work across teams.
• Guide major architectural decisions and help teams resolve disagreements with clear reasoning and evidence.
• Mentor senior and staff engineers, strengthening their technical judgment and ability to lead across team boundaries.

How You Work

• You bring structure to ambiguous problems and help teams agree on what to solve first.
• You pair architectural judgment with hands-on engineering and ownership through delivery.
• You build alignment across teams, challenge assumptions, and make decisions when priorities compete.
• You favor simple, maintainable designs and understand when added complexity is necessary.

Qualifications

• Proven experience setting technical direction across multiple engineering teams, aligning engineering and product leaders on architectural decisions, priorities, and tradeoffs.
• Track record of leading complex, cross-team initiatives from problem definition through production delivery, with measurable improvements in reliability, scalability, performance, or engineering productivity.
• 12+ years of software engineering experience, including substantial hands-on experience architecting, building, and operating large-scale distributed systems.
• Deep experience designing and operating production systems in cloud environments such as AWS or GCP, with ownership of architectural decisions and their operational outcomes.
• Strong hands-on software engineering skills, including writing production code and building prototypes to validate architectural approaches.
• Deep expertise in one or more of the following areas, with working knowledge across others:
• Cloud infrastructure, container orchestration, and infrastructure as code, such as Kubernetes and Terraform.
• Event streaming and real-time processing systems, such as Kafka, Flink, or Beam.
• Distributed storage and data systems, including OLAP/OLTP databases, blob storage, and caching.
• Ability to explain complex technical tradeoffs, build alignment across teams and senior leadership, and resolve architectural disagreements.
• Experience mentoring senior and staff engineers, strengthening their architectural judgment, and developing technical leadership across teams.

Pay and benefits

The base salary range Sentry reasonably expects to pay for this position is $260,000 to $400,000, plus an annual performance bonus of up to 20% of base salary. A successful candidate’s actual base salary (or hourly wage) amount will be determined by a variety of relevant factors including, without limitation, the candidate’s work location, education, work and other relevant experience, skills, and job-related knowledge.

A successful candidate will be eligible to participate in Sentry’s employee benefit plans/programs applicable to the candidate’s position (including incentive compensation, equity grants, paid time off, and group health insurance coverage).