Staff Software Engineer, Simulation

Work Location

This role requires working onsite in our San Francisco office for full workdays Monday through Thursday. Employees have the flexibility to work remotely or from the office on Fridays as part of their regular five day workweek. Before applying, please consider whether this ongoing schedule and your expected commute are a good long-term fit.

Your Mission

We're looking for a Staff Software Engineer to help shape the technical future of Second Life's server and simulation systems. You'll tackle complex, ambiguous challenges, lead cross-cutting technical initiatives, and help ensure the systems behind Second Life remain scalable, reliable, and maintainable.

We believe the best Staff Engineers create leverage beyond the code they write. You'll connect teams and systems, identify architectural risks, bring clarity to ambiguity, and help the organization make better technical decisions.

You won't be joining a team that expects you to simply execute a predetermined plan. We want you to question assumptions, identify opportunities, and help solve problems we haven't fully defined yet, while mentoring others and raising the engineering bar across Second Life.

How You'll Grow With Us

At the Lab, you'll experience the best of both worlds: the stability of an established company with over 20 years of expertise and the dynamic momentum of a startup driven by continuous progress. You'll have the unparalleled opportunity to forge meaningful relationships, design impactful systems, and craft strategies that shape the future of virtual experiences.

Our vibrant in-office environment in San Francisco is designed to foster creativity, collaboration, and ingenuity. With spaces purpose-built for brainstorming, team building, and spontaneous conversations, you'll find endless opportunities to engage and grow. We believe in the power of in-person connections to cultivate a strong sense of community and inclusion, ensuring that your ideas are valued, your contributions celebrated, and your impact deeply felt every day.

As you grow in the role, you'll have opportunities to broaden your organizational impact, contribute to strategic technical conversations, and build relationships across engineering, product, and the wider business.

The Impact You'll Drive

• Lead technical discovery, design, implementation, and difficult debugging for ambiguous, high-impact changes across large C++ codebases and adjacent systems.
• Take ownership of complex technical problems from initial definition through production, turning loosely defined challenges into practical, durable solutions.
• Develop a deep understanding of Second Life's existing systems, engineering practices, and operational context before introducing material changes.
• Lead the technical design of initiatives that span multiple systems, codebases, and teams, ensuring solutions work cohesively across the broader ecosystem.
• Guide architectural decisions that improve reliability, performance, scalability, maintainability, and the safe evolution of long-lived systems.
• Proactively identify systemic issues, architectural gaps, and technical risks, anticipating second-order effects and addressing problems before they become larger operational challenges.
• Partner with engineering, product, and other stakeholders to make technical tradeoffs clear, surface risks, and balance near-term delivery with long-term system health.
• Raise the technical capabilities of the team through mentorship, design guidance, technical feedback, and by helping other engineers navigate complex or high-risk decisions.

How You'll Shape Our Future

At Linden, we celebrate all the dimensions of diversity, including diversity of experience. We recognize that candidates applying for this role will be most successful if they bring the following with them:

Experience

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, including at least 3 years building or maintaining real-time simulation, game-server, distributed, or similarly complex production systems.
• 3+ years of production experience with a large, complex C++ codebase, including strong knowledge of memory management, threading, synchronization, and concurrent systems.
• Experience designing, evolving, and operating reliable services across multiple codebases and technical domains, including cloud infrastructure, containerized services, asynchronous network programming, and Python or shell scripting.
• Proven ability to diagnose and resolve difficult production issues, including crashes, memory corruption, race conditions, and other hard-to-reproduce failures.
• Demonstrated Staff-level technical leadership: independently navigating ambiguous problems, making sound engineering decisions, influencing technical direction, and communicating system designs, risks, and tradeoffs clearly across teams.
• A collaborative approach to technical leadership, including mentoring engineers, building shared understanding of complicated systems, and raising engineering standards.
• Experience in any of the following areas is preferred: interpreters, virtual machines, embedded scripting engines, bytecode runtimes, sandboxed execution, APIs, or long-lived serialization formats. Exposure to virtual-world platforms, MMO or game-server architecture, Second Life, LSL, or Lua would be especially valuable.
• This is an in-office role designed for close collaboration and spontaneous problem-solving. On-call responsibilities are performed remotely.

Additional information

If you don't meet every requirement listed for this role, we still encourage you to apply. Too often, the confidence gap or imposter syndrome keeps exceptional candidates from taking the leap-and we don't want that to hold you back. If you believe in our mission and in your ability to make an impact, we want to hear from you!

The Fine Print

Pay and benefits

Linden Lab's Total Rewards philosophy is rooted in fairness, equity, and an unbiased approach to compensation, paired with competitive benefits across all locations where we operate.

For this San Francisco Bay Area-based role, the salary range is $174,500 - $236,000, and Linden Lab hires new employees at the midpoint of this range ($205,000). This midpoint represents the amount the company reasonably expects to pay upon hire.

Base salary is the only form of cash compensation for this role; it does not include variable or bonus pay. In addition to base pay, employees are eligible to be considered for awards under our Equity Incentive Plan (EIP) and receive a comprehensive benefits package that includes medical, dental, vision, and 401(k) plans. Our talent partners will provide more details during the hiring process.

Essential Role Functions & Work Environment

• Perform focused, computer-based tasks and collaborate effectively with coworkers in a dynamic, in-office environment. While some remote collaboration may occur, in-office presence is an essential requirement of this role to foster creativity, teamwork, and spontaneous problem-solving.
• Communicate clearly and effectively through typing, using hands and fingers for keyboard tasks.
• Maintain the ability to sit, stand, or remain stationary for extended periods (up to eight hours) during calls, meetings, or collaborative sessions, with ergonomic workstations and tools provided.
• Sustain prolonged attention on a computer monitor to perform tasks requiring visual focus and attention to detail.
• Operate office equipment and handle materials as needed for presentations, discussions, or team activities.
• Move freely around the office to attend meetings, participate in team activities, and contribute to shared responsibilities, supporting a collaborative and engaging workplace culture.
• Travel may be required for business meetings, team summits, or company events, where in-person participation is an essential part of the role to foster collaboration, alignment, and engagement.