Staff Software Engineer

About the Role

We're looking for a Senior / Staff Software Engineer to join OpenMined, a nonprofit on a mission to build the public network for the world's non-public data — unlocking 1,000,000x more information across every scientific field and industry, and ensuring it stays open, equitable, and accessible to all.

You'll lead our Network Sourced AI squad — the team building two core products that make this vision real. Today, the entire AI stack is built on copying content into model weights and hoping the lawsuits don't land. We think there's a better architecture: data stays at the source, AI queries it live, and every answer carries attribution back to who made it possible. Syft Space is the local node any data owner(a newsroom, a publisher, a research lab, an individual) runs to publish their content under their own terms and pricing.

Syft Hub is the network layer that lets AI labs, agents, and app developers find those nodes and query across them in real time.

This is a team lead + hands-on technical leadership role. You write code. You make architecture decisions. You set engineering standards by example. You're the most experienced engineer on the squad, the person others look to for production-quality judgment, and the voice that connects this team's decisions with the organization's broader platform strategy.

The squad is talented and mission-driven and looking to strengthen its ability to continuously ship production software. You bring this production muscle: the instinct for what scales, the judgment about what to build and what to kill, and the craft to raise the team's standard through code review, pairing, and architectural guidance rather than mandates.

If you're motivated by building distributed systems that matter, mentoring brilliant people who are just getting started, and making hard technical calls in a fast-moving nonprofit that's trying to change how the world shares data — we'd love to hear from you.

Responsibilities

• Own the NSAI squad technical architecture end to end — align design, engineering, and deployment across stack to deliver reliable technical capabilities and user experience from current implementation through product roadmap evolution.
• Drive production readiness through deployment monitoring, error handling, graceful degradation, and operational runbooks.
• Be a force multiplier by establishing, demonstrating, and mentoring the team to establish norms around engineering best practices (including system design for modularity, security, reliability, & scalability), code quality, and delivery to production.
• Collaborate on core technology stack strategy through architectural review and identification of NSAI components that should become shared organizational primitives and defining standard interfaces that prevent tight coupling.
• Partner with product lead to develop and execute on realistic roadmaps that balance what is desired with what is feasible, scalable, and architecturally sounds.
• Own the delivery of engineering’s quarterly goals, ensuring consistent, high-impact delivery while effectively managing resources.
• Own team output, delivery, and success (productivity, timeliness, morale) through appropriately matching team members and work to properly balance interest, learning opportunities, capacity, and capability.
• Champion high-quality software delivery through the establishment of robust tools, processes, & methodologies, and by providing hands-on technical leadership via individual development contributions and code reviews.
• Create technical documentation and processes that support high velocity and knowledge transfer.
• Manage a team of 2-4 engineers as a people leader, performing 1:1s, providing technical and professional feedback, creating professional development plans, and performing performance reviews.

Requirements

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience with a track record of personally building, shipping, and operating production systems at meaningful scale
• Strong Python proficiency — FastAPI, async patterns, Docker orchestration
• Vue 3 / TypeScript, Rust / Tauri, or cross-platform desktop app experience extremely beneficial
• Networking/P2P application experience beneficial
• Distributed systems and API design experience including design & evolution of interfaces consumed by multiple independent teams
• Practical RAG and information retrieval experience with vector databases, retrieval pipelines, embedding strategies, and aggregation
• Demonstration of technical leadership through the introduction of engineering quality practices to one or more teams
• Comfort with ambiguity and resource constraints
• Async-fluent with strong written communication and capacity to build high-trust working relationships across 6hr+ time zone spread
• Cross-functional collaboration & communication to facilitate and improve understanding/context sharing between engineers and non-engineering/non-technical stakeholders
• Located within ET +/- 1 to enable rapid team-oriented communication, learning, and feedback cycles as well as facilitate engagement with remainder of OpenMined engineering team, globally.