Staff Engineer

About hireworks

hireworks is building a community of top talent in key international markets by unlocking unparalleled access to positions at leading U.S. based companies. As your employer, hireworks will ensure you have a seamless interview, onboarding, and employee experience - providing ongoing support and resources along the way. Established in 2023, hireworks is forging corp-to-corp relationships with leading U.S. based organizations looking to grow their teams with best-in-class talent around the world. Working with hireworks means unlocking access to a network of local peers and mentors and career opportunities through our client network.

About Our client

A leading provider of innovative software and services to K-12 schools and educational institutions worldwide. Their mission is to empower schools to transform education through technology. They believe in the power of education to shape the future, and are committed to helping schools prepare students for success and make a positive impact on the world.

Position Overview

Finalsite is seeking a Staff Engineer to provide senior technical leadership across its engineering organization. This is a highly influential individual contributor role, working closely with engineering leadership and the CTO to solve complex technical challenges across a large-scale, evolving platform.

Rather than being tied to a single system, Staff Engineers will apply their expertise where it can have the greatest impact- from modernizing legacy platforms and improving reliability to guiding architecture and supporting the ongoing rebuild of core infrastructure.

Finalsite operates a multi-cloud environment across AWS and GCP, using Kubernetes, queue-driven and event-driven architectures, and technologies including .Net, Ruby/Rails, Python, and C/C++.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead the modernization of complex legacy systems, including decoupling dependencies and definingexecutable migration strategies

• Drive technical initiatives from architecture and planning through implementation and production ownership

• Improve platform reliability and observability through monitoring, alerting, SLOs, incident management, and operational best practices

• Make and influence key architectural decisions across distributed, cloud-based systems

• Provide technical leadership to engineering teams through design reviews, mentorship, and engineering standards

• Partner with engineering leadership on the ongoing rebuild of core data and communications infrastructure

• Ensure new systems are scalable, maintainable, reliable, and operationally sustainable

• Establish clear technical outcomes and drive complex initiatives through to completion

• Work effectively across both modern and legacy environments, balancing long-term architectural improvements with immediate business needs

• Raise the technical bar across the organization through strong engineering judgment and hands-on leadership

• Extensive experience as a senior or staff-level software engineer working with large-scale production systems

• Strong experience with distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, and containerized workloads

• Hands-on experience with AWS and/or GCP and Kubernetes

• Deep expertise in at least one relevant area such as:

  • Backend engineering with Python or Ruby/Rails

  • Cloud infrastructure and Kubernetes

  • Messaging, notification, or event-driven systems

  • Large-scale platform modernization and migration

• Proven experience owning production systems and resolving complex reliability or scalability challenges

• Strong understanding of observability, monitoring, SLOs, incident management, and production reliability

• Experience modernizing or migrating legacy systems without disrupting critical production environments

• Strong architectural judgment and the ability to clearly communicate technical trade-offs

• Demonstrated ability to mentor engineers, lead technical discussions, and improve engineering standards

• Comfortable working in complex environments where requirements and technical paths may not always be clearly defined

• JRuby or other polyglot environments

• MongoDB

• Terraform

• Cloudflare Workers or edge computing

• AWS services including SQS, Lambda, and DynamoDB

• KEDA

• Email or SMS delivery infrastructure

• Multi-tenant SaaS platforms

• EdTech experience