Staff Software Engineer

Job description

Depot helps software teams build faster and spend less time waiting. The platform spans Depot CI, remote container builds, GitHub Actions runners, remote cache, registry, APIs, SDKs, and the CLI. Across all of it, our job is to make hard infrastructure feel fast, dependable, and easy for developers. We’re looking for a Staff Engineer who can work across the whole product. You might redesign onboarding, shape an API, change a CLI command, improve logs and errors, simplify billing or permissions, or debug a production issue with support at your side. The common thread is turning messy customer pain into crisp product and technical work. This is a high-ownership role on a small team. You’ll help decide what to build, make tradeoffs explicit, write the technical plan, build important pieces yourself, bring teammates along, and measure whether the work made customers faster or less blocked. We care as much about how you work as what you know. You should listen well, write clearly, handle disagreement without creating drag, and build trust through judgment and follow-through. Direct experience with our exact stack helps, but it is not the bar. We care more about learning deeply and shipping thoughtful work. Please note: Depot is remote-only. For this role we can currently support hiring within North America and Europe. ## What you’ll do - Own product work across the web console, APIs, CLI, GitHub integrations, billing and usage, permissions, docs, and internal tools. - Turn ambiguous customer pain into clear product and technical plans, then carry them through design, implementation, rollout, and measurement. - Improve developer-facing workflows for CI, container builds, cache, registry, runners, setup, logs, errors, and integrations. - Design APIs and data models that are consistent, understandable, and safe to evolve. - Debug production issues across services, databases, AWS infrastructure, integrations, and customer environments. - Raise the engineering bar through design docs, code review, mentorship, and calm technical leadership. ## What we’re looking for - Staff-level product engineering judgment across backend behavior, API shape, data model, UI flow, and operational reality. - Experience owning meaningful projects from ambiguity to production, including sequencing, tradeoffs, rollout, and follow-through. - Strong technical depth in backend, full-stack, platform, infrastructure, or developer-tooling systems. - Excellent debugging instincts across application code, APIs, databases, background jobs, cloud infrastructure, observability, and third-party integrations. - Developer empathy for clear APIs, intuitive CLIs, useful docs, actionable errors, and workflows that feel fast and trustworthy. - High emotional intelligence: you communicate clearly, handle disagreement constructively, and help a remote team make better decisions. Typically this comes from 7+ years of production engineering experience, or equivalent depth in product, platform, infrastructure, or developer tools. Helpful background includes CI systems, GitHub Actions, build tooling, Docker/BuildKit, remote caching, auth/SSO, billing, or observability. Direct experience with our specific stack is a bonus, but not required: TypeScript, Go, React, protobuf/gRPC-style APIs, MySQL/PlanetScale, ClickHouse, AWS, and OpenTelemetry. ## How we work Depot is fully remote and distributed across the US, Canada, and Europe. We rely on clear writing, async collaboration, and people who can create clarity without waiting for perfect instructions. We are a small team trying to do unusually ambitious work. Ownership matters here: you make choices, own outcomes, and share what you learn when those choices work or do not. Work is not family. We care about excellent work and meeting commitments, and we also expect people to have real lives outside of Depot. We make decisions with customer context and data. Strong opinions are useful; clear evidence and good judgment are better. ## Equal opportunity Depot is an equal opportunity employer. We welcome candidates from different backgrounds and encourage you to apply even if your experience does not match every bullet. If you need a reasonable accommodation during the interview process, let us know.