Senior / Staff Software Engineer

Senior / Staff Software Engineer

Full-time Remote — Santa Barbara, CA or Europe preferred (time zones compatible with either)

Individual contributor track — no direct reports. Evaluated on your ability to independently own the architecture of a system or component, not on managing people. Reports to our VP of Engineering, joining a team of ~10 engineers.

What you’d own

• Design, build, and evolve a specific subsystem within Talos Linux or Omni end-to-end — from technical proposal through production operation.
• Write and drive adoption of architecture/design docs on your own technical authority, not through org-chart authority.
• Do root-cause work on hard, cross-stack problems spanning the Linux kernel, containerd, etcd, the Kubernetes control plane, or virtualization internals (KVM/libvirt).
• Raise the bar through code review, RFC feedback, and pairing — mentorship without formal performance management.

What we’re looking for

• 6+ years professional software engineering experience with deep, hands-on Go expertise.
• A track record of independently architecting a non-trivial system or component in production — not just contributing to one someone else designed.
• Deep Linux systems knowledge: kernel internals, syscalls, cgroups/namespaces, or comparable low-level systems work.
• Production experience with Kubernetes and the cloud-native control-plane stack (containerd, etcd) — OR deep experience with virtualization internals (KVM, libvirt) is equally valued.
• Writing Kubernetes controllers/operators, gRPC-based services, or virtualization tooling — strong plus.
• Prior open-source maintainer or significant-contributor experience — strong plus.
• Comfortable being the final technical call on your area without needing managerial authority to make it stick.

Our interview process

Our process usually looks like this:

• Intro interview — short, no technical questions, just to get to know each other, plus a quick cultural fit check (1 person).
• Offline code review — either you share open-source code you’re proud of, or you complete a small test exercise; either way, the team reviews your source code, and the result is either “good, let’s move on” or “bad, let’s stop here” (offline).
• Technical session — we start by asking questions about your code submission, then move into several areas of discussion without any live coding (3–4 people).

Compensation approach

Base salary 130,000–250,000 USD, based on location and depth of relevant systems experience.