Staff+ Software Engineer

Job description

**About Natter** 🗣 **Natter harnesses the power of AI and video to give everyone a voice.** In early April 2026, [**Natter announced its Series A**](https://www.trynatter.com/blog-posts/natter-raises-23m-to-scale-enterprise-ai-conversation-intelligence). $23M total raised to define the enterprise conversation intelligence category. **Natter is already being used by some of the world’s largest companies** including ServiceNow, Accenture, Philip Morris, Lego, PwC, Mondelez, Cox Enterprises, SAP, Miro, Deloitte, Synopsys and many more. Natter’s conversational AI platform allows tens of thousands of users to simultaneously share ideas and feedback through real-time video conversations. Its uniquely scalable tech allows anyone with a smartphone to, literally, have a say on the most important decisions - ranging from workplace strategy to new product offerings. We partner with some of the world’s largest and most complex enterprises (Fortune 500 and equivalent), and are **currently growing our team from 30 to 60 employees.** **The Role** This is one of the most senior technical roles at Natter. You’ll be accountable for the technical direction of our platform: what we build on, how it scales, and how we get there without slowing down. You’ll join a strong engineering team and work closely with product and engineering leadership. We’re hiring at Staff or Principal level. The level is set at offer, based on the scope you’ve demonstrably operated at. This role is for engineers who have **already** set technical direction for a platform or organisation, designed systems that others build on for years, and made a whole engineering team measurably better. This isn’t a stepping stone into Staff, and it is not an architecture role detached from code. You’ll be among the strongest hands-on engineers on the team, and you’ll be expected to prove it. **What You’ll Own** - **Technical strategy.** Help define the multi-year technical direction for the platform, tie it to business outcomes, and turn it into a roadmap the team can execute against. We have strong engineers working on this, and you’re expected to join and push together. - **The hardest systems.** Personally lead the design of our most critical and highest-risk systems, such as our AI conversation pipeline, data architecture, and multi-tenant platform, from first principles through to production at scale. - **The highest-stakes decisions.** Make and defend the decisions that are expensive to reverse, including build vs. buy, data models, service boundaries, and platform choices. Your design docs will set the standard for how we decide things. - **Engineering standards.** Own the bar for reliability, security, observability, performance, and cost across the entire platform, and hold the team to it. - **The engineering organisation.** Contribute to how we hire, level, and grow engineers. Mentor senior engineers into Staff-level contributors, and own the technical hiring bar. - **Product direction.** Be a genuine partner to product and engineering leadership. Bring technical insight that improves what we build. - **Enterprise trust.** Be the technical face of Natter for our largest clients in security reviews, architecture deep dives, and high-stakes incidents. - **Code.** Stay hands-on in the critical path. Build prototypes to de-risk decisions, code the hardest pieces yourself, and be the person the team turns to when something is badly broken. **Non-Negotiables** **Operated at Staff level or above.** You’ve been formally recognised at Staff, Principal, or equivalent, or you’ve been the senior technical lead at a startup with clearly equivalent scope. Your impact reached across multiple teams or the whole engineering organisation. - **Set technical direction that stuck.** You authored a technical strategy or major architectural direction, drove alignment across engineers and leadership without formal authority, and saw it delivered. - **Designed systems at real scale, and lived with them.** You were the lead designer of production systems handling significant load, data, or complexity, and you stayed long enough to own the consequences: migrations, re-architectures, incidents, and the decisions you’d now reverse. - **Led through serious incidents.** You’ve owned production incidents with real business impact, from response through root cause to systemic fixes. - **Made other engineers better at scale.** You can point to engineers you grew into senior or Staff roles, and to standards or practices you introduced that outlasted your direct involvement. - **Exceptional written communication.** Your design docs and strategy documents change minds. We will read your writing before we meet you. - **Still a top-tier hands-on engineer.** You write production code regularly and well. Deep expertise in at least one domain (distributed systems, data infrastructure, or frontend architecture) and enough fluency across the stack to make sound calls anywhere in it. - **Deep AWS and infrastructure experience.** Production cloud architecture, infrastructure-as-code, CI/CD, and observability at scale. **Strong Signals** - Built and operated AI/LLM-powered products in production, including evaluation, latency, cost, and reliability trade-offs. - Enterprise B2B SaaS at scale: multi-tenancy, SSO, data isolation, and compliance (SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR). - Event-driven and streaming architectures (e.g. Kafka) in production. - Took a platform and engineering team through a rapid growth phase at a startup. - Public technical work, such as talks, writing, or meaningful open-source contributions. **This Role Isn’t for You If...** - You’re a strong Senior engineer looking for your first Staff role. We’d love to hear from you for other openings, but not this one. - You haven’t written production code regularly in the last two years. - You need a detailed spec, a stable roadmap, or a large supporting team to be effective. - Your experience is mainly in a narrow specialism, and you haven’t owned broad technical direction. **The Stack** - **Languages:** Kotlin, TypeScript, Python, Rust - **Frontend:** React - **Data:** Postgres, DynamoDB, Kafka - **Infra & Compute:** ECS, EKS, Lambda - **IaC:** AWS CDK We care about fundamentals over specific languages, but you’ll be expected to become credible across this stack quickly. **What We Offer** - Top-of-market Staff+ salary, depending on level and significant equity - Direct influence on the technical direction of the company, working alongside the CEO and leadership team - Remote-first working, with a private office in Temple/Strand, London for collaboration and team lunches - Quarterly international team offsites - 6 weeks paid annual leave **The Process** Our process typically takes three weeks: 1. **Technical leadership conversation** with Head of Engineering (45 mins): your scope, your impact, and how you operate. 2. **Engineering conversation with one of our engineers**: your way of working, stack, interests. We’ll get geeky. 3. **Take home assignment** (1.5 hours): Prove that you can turn in high caliber work. 4. **Deep dive** (1.5 hours): a deep-dive walkthrough of a system you led. Expect us to probe every decision, failure mode, and trade-off or an open-ended design problem. 5. **Cross-functional panel** (1 hour) with product leadership: strategy, influence, and disagreement. 6. **Final conversation with the CEO**, plus references. We’ll ask to speak with people who worked with you at Staff level. If you need any adjustments or support during the application process, please let us know.