Staff Software Engineer (Java, Python)

Staff Software Engineer (Java, Python)
About the Role
The Staff Engineer is a recognized leader in the organization, responsible for driving the technical strategy and execution of critical, high-scale systems. This role operates with high technical autonomy, focusing on solving problems that cross team and organizational boundaries and ensuring the platform can scale to meet the company's long-term needs.
In this role, you will:

• Define and drive the multi-year technical roadmap and architecture for a major platform component or domain, anticipating future scaling, performance, and security requirements.
• Act as the expert technical consultant and decision-maker for complex architecture choices, balancing trade-offs between performance, cost, and development speed.
• Lead the design and implementation of large-scale distributed systems, leveraging expert-level knowledge of Core Java to build robust, high-throughput, and low-latency services.
• Identify opportunities for significant architectural simplification or refactoring that materially improves product reliability, developer velocity, or system performance.
• Mentor and coach engineers at all levels (SE I through SSE), raising the overall technical bar and promoting best practices across the organization.
• Collaborate closely with Product Management and Engineering leadership to translate business objectives into clear, executable technical strategies.

The skills you'll bring include:

• A minimum of 8+ years experience in software development, with demonstrated mastery of Core Java and its ecosystem, including deep knowledge of distributed systems in a Core Java environment.
• Expert-level understanding of the JVM, including advanced garbage collection tuning, memory management, and performance diagnostics.
• Proven Ability to work in Python to solve complex problems, or a strong track record of quickly adopting and leveraging new languages/technologies like Python for strategic initiatives, tooling, or data processing.
• Extensive experience designing and operating mission-critical services on Cloud Infrastructure such as AWS / GCP / Azure, including experience with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, CloudFormation).
• Deep expertise in architectural patterns for large-scale distributed systems (e.g., event-driven architecture, microservices, consensus protocols, large-scale data storage/processing).
• Demonstrated experience leading technical strategy and large, complex projects that span multiple engineering teams.
• Exceptional communication and influencing skills, capable of driving consensus on technical decisions across organizational boundaries.
• Defines the technical direction for how the organization uses GenAI, ensuring it aligns with long-term product and engineering strategy.
• Architects scalable, reusable GenAI integration patterns, frameworks, or platforms that multiple teams can adopt.
• A track record of identifying technical debt, proposing solutions, and successfully driving major engineering initiatives to completion.

About Rapid7
At Rapid7, our vision is to create a secure digital world for our customers, our industry, and our communities. We do this by harnessing our collective expertise and passion to challenge what's possible and drive extraordinary impact. We're building a dynamic and collaborative workplace where new ideas are welcome.
Protecting 11,000+ customers against bad actors and threats means we're continuing to push the envelope just like we' ve been doing for the past 20 years. If you 're ready to solve some of the toughest challenges in cybersecurity, we're ready to help you take command of your career. Join us.