Staff Engineer - Product Engineering

About the role

Shape how millions of people discover their strengths, engage their teams, and act on Gallup's research, and set the bar for how Gallup engineers build with AI.

Gallup's engineering organization builds the products that put Gallup's science into people's hands: CliftonStrengths®, employee engagement platforms, and the reporting and coaching experiences that turn decades of research into something people use every day.

If you want a seat that serves people around the globe and moves with the biggest technical problems in the organization instead of staying put on one team's roadmap, this is it.

About the Role

We're looking for a staff engineer to work day to day with our head of engineering as a technical thought partner across a sizable engineering organization, moving to wherever the next product initiative needs strong technical judgment most, whether that's building out new platforms, creating new product experiences or implementing new capabilities.

This is a horizontal, cross-team role, not a single-team ownership role. You'll mentor senior engineers and tech leads across the organization, help set the standard for how Gallup engineers use AI to build better and faster, and partner with our AI Infrastructure team on the governance and best practices that keep AI-assisted development moving fast without cutting corners.

You'll also stay closely connected with our Data Platform team, so we consistently bring the right data and insight to bear across our initiatives, and you'll contribute to modernizing shared platform foundations like identity and access along the way.

Above all, you'll be expected to surface opportunities we haven't asked for yet: new tools, techniques or architectural approaches from your own experience that could shape how we work here.

What You'll Do

• Partner directly with the head of engineering as a technical thought partner across multiple concurrent initiatives, not tied to a single team's backlog
• Provide hands-on technical guidance to engineering managers, tech leads and senior engineers across teams, especially on architecture decisions with cross-team consequences
• Bring effective AI-assisted engineering practices into the teams you work with, using AI where it genuinely speeds things up and keeping human judgment as the check
• Lead a community of practice for senior engineers and tech leads, creating space for shared standards and technical growth outside the reporting line
• Hunt down emerging tools, techniques and architectural patterns before anyone asks you to, and bring concrete, evaluated recommendations back to engineering leadership
• Shape what gets built next and how we'll know it worked, championing data and instrumentation as the basis for those calls
• Step into critical initiatives as a hands-on contributor when the problem calls for it, from early design through to production
• Translate high-level technical strategy (platform consolidation, identity and access modernization, AI tooling adoption) into concrete guidance teams can act on

What Makes You Stand Out

• Cross-team technical influence: You've built strong credibility across teams, and people consistently seek out your judgment on complex technical decisions because of your expertise and proven track record.
• AI-fluent, not AI-dazzled: You have hands-on experience with AI-assisted development tools and can speak concretely to where they help, where they don't, and how to build a team's judgment rather than just its tool list.
• Comfortable without formal authority: You can align multiple teams and drive a technical direction through credibility and clarity, not org-chart position.
• A finder, not just a builder: You proactively surface technology and process opportunities before anyone asks, and you bring them forward with enough evaluation to be actionable.
• Strong day-to-day partnerships: You communicate clearly and often, work well in ambiguity, and are someone a head of engineering can think out loud with.
• Mentorship instinct: You develop the senior engineers and tech leads around you, and you're energized by growing other people's technical judgment, not just your own.
• Energized by scope, not just depth: You'd rather have real influence across a whole org's technical direction than deep ownership of one corner of it.

What You Need

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, computer engineering or a related field, or equivalent experience, required
• At least eight years of professional software engineering experience, with demonstrated impact at a staff or equivalent cross-team scope, required
• Track record of influencing technical direction and aligning multiple teams without direct management authority required
• Hands-on experience using AI-assisted development tools in real production work, with the judgment to know where to trust them and where not to, required
• Experience mentoring senior engineers and technical leads and building shared technical standards across a group required
• Strong system design and architecture fundamentals, with comfort moving across different parts of a stack as initiatives demand required
• Experience partnering closely with an engineering leader (head of engineering, director, or vice president) in an advisory, thought-partner capacity preferred
• Experience with identity and access platforms (such as Auth0 or Okta), survey or assessment-driven products, or large-scale platform migrations preferred
• A commitment to working on-site at Gallup's San Francisco office at least three days per week required