# Staff Software Engineer, Platform & Infrastructure
**Company:** [Sentry](https://scaleengineer.com/companies/sentry)
Staff Software Engineer role at Sentry focused on designing, building, and operating distributed systems and cloud infrastructure that power the company's application monitoring platform. This position requires 8+ years of software engineering experience with deep expertise in distributed systems, cloud infrastructure (Kubernetes, Terraform), real-time event processing, or infrastructure reliability. You'll own technically complex projects end-to-end, influence engineering decisions across teams, and maintain hands-on involvement with production systems while mentoring other engineers.
**Role:** Staff Engineer
**Seniority:** Staff
**Locations:** San Francisco, California
**Salary:** 240000–400000 USD
[Apply](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/sentry/68b3897c-bbb0-4f90-aa9a-57981323e26b)
Canonical: https://scaleengineer.com/jobs/sentry/staff-software-engineer-platform-infrastructure
---
## Responsibilities

- Design and Operate Distributed Systems at Scale: Design, build, and operate reliable, scalable distributed systems that support Sentry's products and engineering teams. Focus on creating systems that handle massive event volumes with high availability, fault tolerance, and performance optimization for real-time processing requirements.
- Own Complex Technical Projects End-to-End: Take ownership of technically complex projects from problem identification and solution definition through implementation, deployment, and production operations. Independently navigate ambiguity, establish requirements, and drive delivery with minimal oversight while ensuring quality and reliability.
- Solve Challenging Systems Problems: Tackle difficult engineering challenges involving system architecture, performance optimization, scalability, reliability, and operational efficiency. Evaluate intricate tradeoffs between competing priorities including performance, complexity, maintainability, and long-term scalability to make thoughtful architectural decisions.
- Contribute Production-Quality Code: Stay hands-on with engineering by contributing production-quality code, conducting design reviews, and helping resolve complex technical issues. Balance technical leadership responsibilities with direct engineering contributions to maintain deep system understanding.
- Drive Technical Direction and Standards: Collaborate with engineers and technical leaders across teams to influence technical direction, establish engineering standards, and drive infrastructure improvements. Lead initiatives that raise the bar for engineering quality and establish best practices across the organization.
- Identify Opportunities for Technical Improvement: Proactively identify technical challenges and opportunities for improvement, including problems without clearly defined requirements or established solutions. Take initiative in recognizing important problems rather than waiting for assignments and propose pragmatic solutions.
- Mentor and Knowledge Transfer: Share technical knowledge, mentor other engineers, and help strengthen engineering practices across the organization. Contribute to team growth by helping other engineers develop expertise, improve technical decision-making, and advance their careers.

## Requirements

### education

- {"name":"Computer Science or Equivalent Technical Foundation","description":"Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent professional experience demonstrating strong software engineering fundamentals including algorithms, system design, and software architecture."}

### technical

- {"name":"Programming Languages Proficiency","description":"Strong proficiency in at least one programming language such as Python, Go, Java, C++, or comparable language. Demonstrated ability to write clean, maintainable, production-quality code with solid software engineering fundamentals."}
- {"name":"Distributed Systems Knowledge","description":"Deep understanding of distributed systems concepts including fault tolerance, consistency models, replication strategies, high-availability design patterns, and architectural trade-offs in distributed environments."}
- {"name":"Cloud Infrastructure Technologies","description":"Hands-on proficiency with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and infrastructure tools including Kubernetes for container orchestration, Terraform for infrastructure-as-code, and service discovery systems."}
- {"name":"Data Infrastructure and Streaming","description":"Experience with modern data infrastructure including message brokers like Kafka, real-time stream processing, distributed storage systems, and databases (OLAP/OLTP). Understanding of large-scale data processing architectures."}
- {"name":"Infrastructure Reliability and Observability","description":"Expertise in observability tools, metrics collection, logging systems, performance profiling, capacity planning, and incident response procedures. Experience designing systems for reliability, maintainability, and operational efficiency."}
- {"name":"Developer Infrastructure and DevOps","description":"Experience building CI/CD systems, deployment infrastructure, developer environments, and internal developer platforms. Knowledge of build systems, automated testing infrastructure, and developer productivity tools."}

### experience

- {"name":"8+ Years Software Engineering Experience","description":"Minimum 8 years of professional software engineering experience with demonstrated expertise in designing, building, and operating large-scale distributed systems and infrastructure. Track record of delivering meaningful engineering outcomes and handling systems complexity at production scale."}
- {"name":"Complex Systems Design and Implementation","description":"Proven experience designing and implementing technically complex systems with evidence of delivering high-impact engineering projects. Demonstrated ability to navigate system design challenges involving multiple moving parts, dependencies, and operational considerations."}
- {"name":"Cloud Infrastructure Operations","description":"Hands-on experience with cloud infrastructure and services including AWS, GCP, or Azure. Experience managing container orchestration, infrastructure provisioning, networking, monitoring, and production systems at scale."}
- {"name":"Independent Project Ownership","description":"Demonstrated ability to independently own complex technical projects, navigate ambiguity, and drive solutions from design through production. Experience identifying technical problems, proposing solutions, and executing delivery with minimal direction."}
- {"name":"Deep Expertise in Specialized Infrastructure Domain","description":"Deep technical experience in one or more specialized areas: cloud infrastructure (Kubernetes, Terraform, IaC), distributed systems architecture, data infrastructure (Kafka, streaming, OLAP/OLTP), infrastructure reliability (observability, performance optimization, incident response), or developer infrastructure (CI/CD, deployment systems)."}
- {"name":"Engineering Practices and Mentorship","description":"Experience improving engineering practices, sharing technical knowledge, or helping other engineers develop expertise. Demonstrated ability to influence engineering quality and establish standards across teams."}

## Skills

### required

- {"name":"Distributed Systems Architecture","description":"Strong architectural judgment with the ability to design reliable, scalable systems. Expertise in evaluating technical trade-offs and making decisions that balance performance, complexity, maintainability, and long-term scalability."}
- {"name":"Cloud Infrastructure Expertise","description":"Deep hands-on experience with cloud platforms, container orchestration, and infrastructure-as-code. Ability to design cloud architectures that are cost-effective, scalable, and maintainable."}
- {"name":"Systems-Level Problem Solving","description":"Ability to tackle complex problems where the solution isn't immediately obvious. Strong debugging and problem-solving skills for distributed systems with multiple failure modes."}
- {"name":"Production Operations","description":"Hands-on experience running systems in production, managing reliability, performance optimization, incident response, and operational complexity. Understanding of production-grade systems requirements."}
- {"name":"Technical Communication","description":"Ability to communicate complex technical concepts clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences. Strong presentation and documentation skills for design discussions and knowledge sharing."}
- {"name":"Technical Leadership and Influence","description":"Ability to influence technical decisions across teams and establish engineering standards without formal authority. Experience leading complex projects and driving initiatives to successful completion."}
- {"name":"Code Quality and Craftsmanship","description":"Commitment to writing clean, maintainable, production-quality code. Strong software engineering fundamentals including design patterns, testing, and code review practices."}

### preferred

- {"name":"Real-Time Event Processing","description":"Experience with real-time data pipeline architecture, stream processing frameworks, and systems handling high-volume event throughput at scale. Relevant to Sentry's core monitoring platform architecture."}
- {"name":"Observability and Monitoring","description":"Hands-on experience building or operating observability systems, metrics platforms, distributed tracing, or error tracking systems. Direct experience with monitoring large-scale systems."}
- {"name":"Kafka and Message Brokers","description":"Production experience with Apache Kafka or similar message broker technologies. Knowledge of stream processing patterns, topic design, and scaling message infrastructure."}
- {"name":"Kubernetes and Container Orchestration","description":"Extensive hands-on experience with Kubernetes, container orchestration platforms, and multi-cluster deployment strategies. Understanding of container networking and resource management."}
- {"name":"Open Source Contributions","description":"Active contributions to open-source infrastructure projects, data systems, or developer tools. Experience maintaining or leading open-source projects relevant to infrastructure or systems engineering."}
- {"name":"Database Systems","description":"Deep experience with various database technologies including both OLTP and OLAP systems, distributed databases, and understanding of different consistency models and trade-offs."}
- {"name":"Go Programming Language","description":"Production experience writing systems software in Go. Familiarity with Go's concurrency model and its application to building scalable backend systems and infrastructure tools."}
- {"name":"Incident Response and SRE Practices","description":"Experience leading incident response, designing error budgets, and implementing SRE practices. Knowledge of chaos engineering, reliability testing, and production readiness reviews."}

## Tech stack

### tools

- {"name":"AWS (Amazon Web Services)","description":"Leading cloud computing platform providing infrastructure services including EC2, RDS, S3, and managed Kubernetes (EKS). Experience with AWS services essential for cloud infrastructure roles."}
- {"name":"Google Cloud Platform (GCP)","description":"Google's cloud computing platform offering infrastructure services including Compute Engine, Cloud SQL, and managed Kubernetes (GKE). Strong alternative to AWS with focus on data analytics."}
- {"name":"Azure","description":"Microsoft's cloud computing platform providing comprehensive infrastructure and managed services. Enterprise-focused cloud provider with strong integration with Microsoft ecosystem."}
- {"name":"Container Technologies","description":"Docker and containerization platforms for packaging applications with dependencies. Essential foundation for modern infrastructure and deployment practices."}
- {"name":"CI/CD Tools","description":"Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment systems for automating build, test, and deployment workflows. Tools like Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, or CircleCI."}

### others

- {"name":"Observability and Monitoring Platforms","description":"Systems for monitoring application and infrastructure health including metrics collection, logging, distributed tracing, and alerting. Directly relevant to Sentry's domain."}
- {"name":"Distributed Systems Patterns","description":"Design patterns and architectural approaches for building reliable, scalable systems including microservices, event-driven architecture, and fault-tolerant systems."}
- {"name":"Performance Optimization","description":"Techniques and tools for profiling, identifying bottlenecks, and optimizing system performance at scale. Includes database query optimization, caching strategies, and resource utilization."}
- {"name":"Infrastructure as Code (IaC)","description":"Practices and tools for managing infrastructure through code and automation. Enables reproducible, version-controlled infrastructure provisioning and configuration management."}

### databases

- {"name":"OLTP Databases","description":"Online Transaction Processing databases optimized for transactional consistency and real-time updates. Examples include PostgreSQL, MySQL, and distributed systems like CockroachDB."}
- {"name":"OLAP and Data Warehousing","description":"Online Analytical Processing systems optimized for complex queries and analytics on large datasets. Technologies include Clickhouse, Snowflake, and BigQuery."}
- {"name":"Distributed Storage","description":"Distributed file systems and object storage for handling large-scale data storage and retrieval. Include technologies like S3, GCS, and distributed databases."}

### languages

- {"name":"Python","description":"High-level programming language commonly used for backend services, data processing, and infrastructure automation. Strong candidate language for building scalable systems."}
- {"name":"Go","description":"Systems programming language designed for concurrent, scalable applications. Ideal for building microservices, container orchestration tools, and high-performance infrastructure components."}
- {"name":"Java","description":"Enterprise-scale programming language with mature ecosystem for building distributed systems, high-throughput services, and complex backend applications."}

### frameworks

- {"name":"Kubernetes","description":"Container orchestration platform for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. Essential for modern cloud infrastructure."}
- {"name":"Apache Kafka","description":"Distributed message streaming platform for handling high-volume, real-time data pipelines. Core technology for event-driven architectures and real-time processing."}
- {"name":"Terraform","description":"Infrastructure-as-code tool for defining and provisioning cloud infrastructure. Enables reproducible, version-controlled infrastructure management across cloud providers."}

## Benefits

### benefits

- {"name":"Equity Compensation","description":"Participation in Sentry's equity grant program providing ownership stake in the company. Standard for growth-stage technology companies and reflects long-term value alignment."}
- {"name":"Performance Bonus","description":"Annual performance-based bonus up to 15% of base salary, tied to individual and company objectives. Incentivizes high performance and impact delivery."}
- {"name":"Comprehensive Health Insurance","description":"Group health insurance coverage including medical, dental, and vision benefits. Coverage extends to employees and their families for comprehensive healthcare protection."}
- {"name":"Paid Time Off","description":"Flexible paid time off policy enabling work-life balance and personal time for rest and rejuvenation. Typically includes vacation days, sick days, and personal days."}
- {"name":"Inclusive and Diverse Culture","description":"Commitment to building a diverse workforce with an inclusive culture where every teammate can thrive. Sentry actively supports underrepresented groups in technology."}
- {"name":"Accessibility and Reasonable Accommodations","description":"Comprehensive accessibility support and reasonable accommodations for employees with disabilities. Dedicated accommodations contact for individualized support needs."}

## Compensation

- **max:** 400000
- **min:** 240000
- **currency:** USD
- **stockOptions:** true

## Interview process

### steps

## Full description
## **About Sentry**

Software runs the world and the pace is faster than ever. Sentry helps developers fix errors and performance issues before users notice, so teams can spend less time firefighting and more time building.

Trusted by 200,000+ organizations, Sentry is today’s application monitoring standard and our team is building its AI-native future.

# **About the Role**

Sentry helps developers identify and resolve issues in their applications. Behind our products is a complex foundation of distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, and services that must perform reliably at scale.

Our Platform and Infrastructure Engineering teams build and operate the systems that power Sentry. From cloud infrastructure, distributed storage, and real-time event processing to service reliability, scalability, and developer productivity, these teams provide the technical foundation that enables our products and engineering organization to grow.

We're looking for **Staff Software Engineers** to tackle some of Sentry's most challenging infrastructure and distributed systems problems. Depending on your experience and interests, you might work on scaling our real-time event processing systems, improving the reliability and efficiency of our cloud infrastructure, or designing and building foundational services that support our products.

In this role, you'll have the autonomy to identify important technical problems, lead solutions from design through production, and influence engineering decisions beyond your immediate team. We're looking for engineers who enjoy solving difficult problems, remain hands-on with the systems they build, and take pride in delivering meaningful technical impact.

## **In This Role, You Will**

* Design, build, and operate reliable, scalable distributed systems that support Sentry's products and engineering teams.
* Own technically complex projects from identifying problems and defining solutions through implementation, deployment, and production operations.
* Solve challenging engineering problems involving system architecture, performance, scalability, reliability, and operational efficiency.
* Make thoughtful architectural decisions, evaluating tradeoffs between performance, complexity, maintainability, and long-term scalability.
* Proactively identify technical challenges and opportunities for improvement, including problems without clearly defined requirements or established solutions.
* Stay hands-on with engineering, contributing production-quality code, reviewing designs, and helping resolve complex technical issues.
* Collaborate with engineers and technical leaders across teams to influence technical direction, establish engineering standards, and drive improvements.
* Share technical knowledge, mentor other engineers, and help strengthen engineering practices across the organization.

## **You'll Love This Job If You**

* Enjoy solving difficult technical problems where the solution isn't immediately obvious.
* Like designing and building systems that operate reliably at scale.
* Thrive on taking ownership of complex engineering challenges, from initial design through production.
* Balance hands-on engineering with technical leadership and enjoy influencing decisions without formal authority.
* Think critically about architectural tradeoffs and favor pragmatic, maintainable solutions over unnecessary complexity.
* Take initiative in identifying important problems rather than waiting for projects to be assigned.
* Enjoy collaborating with talented engineers, sharing knowledge, and raising the bar for engineering quality.
* Find satisfaction in shipping meaningful improvements and seeing the impact of your work in production.

## **Qualifications**

* 8+ years of software engineering experience, with a strong background in designing, building, and operating distributed systems or infrastructure.
* Strong software engineering fundamentals and proficiency in at least one programming language, such as Python, Go, Java, or a comparable language.
* Experience designing and implementing technically complex systems, with a track record of delivering meaningful engineering outcomes.
* Hands-on experience with cloud infrastructure and services, such as AWS, GCP, or Azure.
* Demonstrated ability to independently own complex technical projects, navigate ambiguity, and drive solutions from design through production.
* Deep technical experience in one or more of the following areas:

  * **Cloud Infrastructure:** Kubernetes, container orchestration, Terraform, infrastructure as code, networking, or service discovery.
  * **Distributed Systems:** Distributed architectures, fault tolerance, consistency, replication, or high-availability systems.
  * **Data Infrastructure:** Kafka, real-time streaming, distributed storage, OLAP/OLTP databases, or large-scale data processing.
  * **Infrastructure Reliability:** Observability, performance optimization, capacity planning, incident response, or production operations.
  * **Developer Infrastructure:** CI/CD systems, build and deployment infrastructure, developer environments, or internal developer platforms.
* Strong architectural judgment, with the ability to evaluate technical tradeoffs and design systems for reliability, performance, and long-term maintainability.
* Ability to communicate complex technical concepts clearly, collaborate effectively, and influence technical decisions across engineering teams.
* Experience improving engineering practices, sharing technical knowledge, or helping other engineers grow.

We recognize that strong engineers come from different backgrounds. You don't need experience in every technology or domain listed above. We're interested in candidates who bring meaningful technical depth, strong engineering judgment, and a track record of solving challenging problems.

The base salary range that Sentry reasonably expects to pay for this position is $240,000 to $400,000, plus an annual performance bonus of up to 15% of base salary. A successful candidate’s actual base salary (or hourly wage) amount will be determined by a variety of relevant factors including, without limitation, the candidate’s work location, education, work and other relevant experience, skills, and job-related knowledge. A successful candidate will be eligible to participate in Sentry’s employee benefit plans/programs applicable to the candidate’s position (including incentive compensation, equity grants, paid time off, and group health insurance coverage). See [Sentry Benefits](https://sentry.io/careers/) for more details about the Company’s benefit plans/programs.

## **Equal Opportunity at Sentry**

Sentry is committed to providing equal employment opportunities to its employees and candidates for employment regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity, veteran status, or other legally-protected characteristic. This commitment includes the provision of reasonable accommodations to employees and candidates for employment with physical or mental disabilities who require such accommodations in order to (a) perform the essential functions of their jobs, or (b) seek employment with Sentry. We strive to build a diverse team, with an inclusive culture where every teammate can thrive. Sentry is an open-source company because we believe that everyone, everywhere, should have the ability and tools to make great software. Software should be accessible. That starts with making our industry accessible.

If you need assistance or an accommodation due to a disability, you may contact us at [accommodations@sentry.io](mailto:accommodations@sentry.io).

Want to learn more about how Sentry handles applicant data? Get the details in our [Applicant Privacy Policy](https://sentry.io/careers/applicantprivacy/).