Staff Engineer

Job Title: Staff Platform EngineerJob Description

This Staff Platform Engineer role focuses on owning and evolving a multi-tenant automotive SaaS platform that powers dealer onboarding, inventory management, and real-time transaction processing. You will act as a technical steward for the engineering organization, ensuring the platform remains healthy, secure, scalable, observable, and maintainable as the company grows. The position emphasizes platform ownership, reliability, security, modernization, and safe delivery practices, with hands-on exposure to agentic AI systems as a capability within the broader platform. You will work across teams, influence engineering standards, and help shape how engineering operates going forward, rather than focusing primarily on feature development.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, ship, and operate agentic AI systems, including autonomous, tool-using agents that observe platform state, reason over dealer context, and act through production APIs.
• Serve as a hands-on platform engineer responsible for the health, security, reliability, and maintainability of a multi-tenant automotive SaaS platform.
• Continuously identify, triage, and remediate security vulnerabilities, including managing dependencies, applying timely patches and upgrades, and enforcing secure-by-default practices.
• Upgrade and modernize frameworks, runtimes, and platform components to keep the stack current, stable, and safe to ship.
• Lead and drive adoption of an agentic development harness to accelerate delivery and improve developer productivity across the organization.
• Own and improve production monitoring and observability, including defining and maintaining SLOs, error budgets, and telemetry to ensure reliable operations.
• Establish, document, and enforce engineering standards, coding guidelines, and best practices across multiple engineering teams.
• Define and manage CI/CD pipelines and release management processes, including quality and security gates, rollback strategies, and progressive delivery mechanisms.
• Champion safe releases by designing checks and balances that gate production, ensuring changes are tested, observable, and reversible.
• Lead SRE practices such as on-call operations, incident response, and post-incident reviews to minimize customer impact and improve system resilience.
• Design and maintain instrumentation and guardrails so that production failures degrade gracefully and fail safe rather than fail loud.
• Collaborate with engineering teams to modernize legacy systems, including evolving a monolith into microservices and microfrontends using domain-driven design and strangler patterns.
• Plan and execute monolith-to-microservice extractions, including dual-write validation, traffic splitting, canary and per-tenant rollouts, and shared database decomposition.
• Contribute to both backend services and frontend applications, owning performance, monitoring, and reliability across the stack.
• Review architecture and code across multiple teams, identifying technical risks early and guiding engineers toward robust, maintainable solutions.
• Integrate with third-party APIs at scale, designing resilient patterns for REST, SOAP, webhooks, idempotency, retries, and backoff strategies.
• Design and operate data models using both relational and NoSQL databases, ensuring appropriate schema design and access patterns.
• Write clear, actionable design documents, ADRs, and runbooks that enable other engineers to implement solutions without extensive meetings.
• Promote reusable abstractions and platform capabilities while avoiding unnecessary complexity and over-engineering.
• Operate security tooling such as dependency and vulnerability scanners, SAST/DAST, and container image scanning in production environments.
• Run observability and on-call tooling in production, ensuring alerts are meaningful, actionable, and aligned with SLOs.
• Support and guide modernization of a legacy monolith while helping redesign components into microfrontends and next-generation services.
• Collaborate closely with senior engineering leadership, providing visibility into platform health, risks, and modernization progress.
• Act as a platform leader who notices systemic problems early, proposes pragmatic solutions, and drives cross-team initiatives to completion.
• Promote a culture of ownership, continuous improvement, and learning across the engineering organization.

Essential Skills

• 7+ years of professional software engineering experience, including at least 2 years operating as a tech lead or staff engineer.
• Hands-on experience building and operating production systems, with at least 2+ years at a senior or Staff level.
• Proficiency in at least three of the following: Python, Java/Spring Boot, PHP/Laravel, TypeScript/React, with the ability to ship production code in a primary stack and review pull requests in the others.
• Hands-on production experience with AWS services including Lambda, EventBridge, DynamoDB, ECS or Fargate, RDS/Aurora, API Gateway, S3, SQS/SNS, CloudWatch, and Secrets Manager.
• Practical experience with AWS serverless architectures (Lambda, EventBridge, DynamoDB, Step Functions) and traditional service architectures (ECS, RDS, API Gateway).
• Proven experience breaking a monolith into microservices, including defining domain-driven service boundaries, applying strangler fig and anti-corruption layer patterns, and leading at least one non-trivial extraction in production with dual-write validation, traffic splitting, and canary or per-tenant rollout.
• Full-stack delivery experience, including shipping frontend (React or similar) and backend services in the same product area and owning performance and monitoring for both.
• Experience integrating with third-party APIs at scale, including REST, SOAP, webhook patterns, idempotency, retry and backoff strategies, and handling vendor-specific quirks.
• Comfort with both relational databases (MySQL/Aurora) and NoSQL databases (DynamoDB), including designing and operating appropriate data models.
• Security-minded engineering practices, including dependency and vulnerability management, timely patching and upgrades, and secure-by-default design.
• Experience with SRE practices, including observability, SLOs and error budgets, on-call operations, and incident response.
• Hands-on experience with CI/CD and release management, including quality and security gates, rollback strategies, and progressive delivery.
• Ability to work comfortably in at least two of Python, Java/Spring Boot, and TypeScript/React, and to read and safely modify legacy PHP code.
• Strong written communication skills, with the ability to produce clear design documents and standards that peers can implement without additional meetings.
• Demonstrated track record of setting engineering standards and ensuring they are adopted and enforced across teams.
• Experience running security tooling such as Snyk, Dependabot, SAST, and DAST in production environments.
• Experience running observability and on-call tooling such as Datadog and PagerDuty in production environments.

Additional Skills & Qualifications

• Hands-on agentic and large language model development experience using tools such as AWS Bedrock, AgentCore, MCP servers, and LangChain/LangGraph, or a strong demonstrated ability to quickly learn modern frameworks.
• Experience building and operating autonomous, tool-using agents that interact with production APIs and platform state.
• Familiarity with OpenTelemetry and SLO/error-budget tooling for observability and reliability engineering.
• Experience with CI/CD platforms and infrastructure-as-code, including CircleCI and CloudFormation, as well as progressive delivery, quality and security gates, and rollback automation.
• Experience with security tooling such as Dependabot, Snyk, SAST/DAST solutions, container image scanning, secrets management, and IAM hardening.
• Experience with reliability and observability tools such as CloudWatch, PagerDuty, Datadog, and related telemetry and alerting systems.
• Knowledge of integration surfaces such as REST, SOAP/XML, EventBridge, SES, and browser automation tools like Playwright.
• Experience with AI and agentic technologies including AWS Bedrock, AgentCore, MCP servers, and LangChain/LangGraph in production contexts.
• Experience with data pipelines and data-lake tooling, such as AWS Glue and Athena, or similar ETL technologies.
• Familiarity with authentication and authorization platforms such as Auth0.
• Experience working in automotive, fintech, or multi-tenant marketplace platforms.
• Ability to draft clear Architecture Decision Records (ADRs), runbooks, and other technical documentation that supports cross-team collaboration.
• Instinct to build reusable abstractions and platform capabilities without over-engineering or adding unnecessary complexity.
• Alignment with values such as customer and dealership focus, ownership, purposeful innovation, valuing diverse perspectives, adaptability, and bias for action.

Work Environment

The role supports remote work, with a hybrid option for individuals based in Colorado who may work onsite approximately two days per week. You will operate within a fast-paced and innovative automotive SaaS environment that emphasizes a fun, casual, and collaborative culture. The platform is a multi-tenant SaaS system built primarily on AWS, using services such as Lambda, EventBridge, DynamoDB, S3, ECS Fargate, Aurora, API Gateway, CloudWatch, and Secrets Manager. The engineering stack includes Python, Java/Spring Boot, TypeScript/React (Next.js), and legacy PHP/Laravel, along with AI and agentic technologies such as AWS Bedrock, AgentCore, MCP servers, and LangChain/LangGraph. Security and reliability are central, with tools like Dependabot, Snyk, SAST/DAST, container image scanning, IAM hardening, OpenTelemetry, CloudWatch, SLO/error-budget tooling, PagerDuty, and Datadog in active use. CI/CD and release processes rely on CircleCI, CloudFormation, progressive delivery, quality and security gates, and rollback automation. The company culture emphasizes replacing friction with a unified platform, integrating digital insights with in-store operations, and delivering transparent, high-trust transactions. Core values include being obsessed with customer and dealer success, demonstrating relentless ownership, inventing with purpose rather than chasing trends, valuing every perspective, embracing change, and favoring action over excessive analysis. Benefits are designed to support employees and their families, and the environment encourages working hard, seeing tangible results, and feeling a clear impact on customers and the business.

Job Type & Location

This is a Contract to Hire position based out of Greenwood Village, CO.

Pay and Benefits

The pay range for this position is $70.00 - $90.00/hr.

Individual compensation offered for this position within this range will depend on many factors, including qualifications, skills, relevant experience, job knowledge, geographic location, internal equity, and other pertinent job-related factors.

Eligibility requirements apply to some benefits and may depend on your job classification and length of employment. Benefits are subject to change and may be subject to specific elections, plan, or program terms. If eligible, the benefits available for this temporary role may include the following: Medical, dental & vision Critical Illness, Accident, and Hospital 401(k) Retirement Plan Pre-tax and Roth post-tax contributions available Life Insurance (Voluntary Life & AD&D for the employee and dependents) Short and long-term disability Health Spending Account (HSA) Transportation benefits Employee Assistance Program Time Off/Leave (PTO, Vacation or Sick Leave)

Workplace Type

This is a fully remote position.

Application Deadline

This position is anticipated to close on Oct 12, 2026.

About Actalent

Actalent is a global leader in engineering and sciences services and talent solutions. We help visionary companies advance their engineering and science initiatives through access to specialized experts who drive scale, innovation and speed to market. With a network of almost 20,000 consultants and 5,000 clients across the U.S., Canada, Asia and Europe, Actalent serves many of the Fortune 500. We are proud to be an Engineering News-Record (ENR) Top 500 Design Firm for our engineering design services and a ClearlyRated Best of Staffing® winner for both client and talent service.

The company is an equal opportunity employer and will consider all applications without regard to race, sex, age, color, religion, national origin, veteran status, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity, genetic information or any characteristic protected by law.

If you would like to request a reasonable accommodation, such as the modification or adjustment of the job application process or interviewing process due to a disability, please email actalentaccommodation@actalentservices.com for other accommodation options.

San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance: Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, for all positions located in the city and county of San Francisco, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

Massachusetts Lie Detector: It is unlawful in Massachusetts to require or administer a lie detector test as a condition of employment or continued employment. An employer who violates this law shall be subject to criminal penalties and civil liability.

Use of Artificial Intelligence (AI): We may use Artificial Intelligence (AI) to support parts of our hiring process, including sourcing, screening, and evaluating candidates. AI helps assess applications and qualifications, but final decisions are made by our hiring team. By applying, you acknowledge and agree that your application may be reviewed using AI tools.