Staff Software Engineer - Tech Lead

At Cerby we believe security is everyone’s business.  Collaborating across your apps doesn’t need to be chaos.  We are a mission-critical cybersecurity company that empowers your teams to operate securely and control their apps completely.  We’ve built our product on the idea that teams deserve autonomy over their work apps.  It turns out that why they are guaranteed a choice, security comes naturally.

More than 50% of all technology is spent outside of centralized IT organizations.  Individual business units are taking their technology destiny into their own hands, and we enable that.  End user onboarded applications are behind more than one third of all cybersecurity hacks.  We provide the solution to manage that through enabling users to select their own technology and we automatically protect those applications.

This role is responsible for technical direction, delivery excellence, and raising engineering standards within a product squad.

You will partner closely with Product, Design, and Engineering leadership to deliver high-impact initiatives while building a strong, healthy engineering culture.

• Own the technical direction of your squad’s roadmap
• Design scalable, reliable, and maintainable system architectures
• Make key technical decisions balancing speed and long-term sustainability
• Lead technical discovery and solution design for complex initiatives
• Drive refactoring and tech debt prioritization as part of our ongoing operations
• Champion the adoption of AI-augmented development practices, leveraging emerging tools to automate rote processes and provide data-driven insights that enhance team skill sets and maximize delivery velocity

• Translate and collaborate on the product requirements to have clear technical plans
• Collaborate in break down large initiatives into actionable deliverables within the sprint
• Scope complex tasks and coordinate team efforts, proactively identifying and removing blockers to maintain delivery velocity
• Identify and evaluate risks early and proactively mitigate, and document them
• Ensure predictable delivery and alignment with OKRs
• Improve development workflows and engineering velocity

• Act as a technical mentor and coach to engineers
• Lead code reviews, promote best practices, and use AI tools to improve them
• Foster a culture of ownership, accountability, and continuous improvement
• Collaborate closely with the Engineering Manager on team health, processes, and performance

• Partner with Product Managers to shape technical feasibility
• Align with other Tech Leads to maintain architectural consistency
• Communicate trade-offs clearly to non-technical stakeholders
  

Technical Expertise

• Backend programming languages: Python, Go, or equivalent.
• Experience with designing, developing, and maintaining scalable SaaS applications in a high-performance startup environment (prior experience in high-growth venture-funded SaaS startups preferred)
• Deep understanding of authentication and authorization protocols: OIDC (OpenID Connect), SAML, and SCIM
• Strong knowledge of identity and access management (IAM) concepts, including RBAC and ABAC
• Expertise in API security best practices and secure coding principles
• Solid understanding of web security vulnerabilities and mitigation strategies (CORS, XSS, CSRF, etc.)
• Knowledge of token-based authentication systems, including JWT implementation and security considerations
• Experience with session management and secure authentication flows
• Prior cybersecurity experience is a plus.
• Cloud platforms (ideally AWS) and prior experience building scalable cloud-based systems.
• Queuing, Messaging and Streaming platforms such as SQS.
• Distributed data stores (S3), plus relational databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL), and key/value databases (Redis, DynamoDB, or similar).
• Software engineering practices such as Iterative Development, CI/CD, Collective Code Ownership, and Refactoring.
• Architecting and designing modular and decoupled software applications and systems.
• Designing distributed, fault-tolerant, high-availability, and resilient systems.
• Proven ability to instrument distributed systems with well-designed telemetry and observability code (prior experience with Open Telemetry and Datadog a plus).

• 6+ years of software engineering experience
• Experience leading technical initiatives end-to-end
• Strong system design and architectural thinking
• Experience working in product-led companies
• Ability to balance short-term delivery with long-term scalability
• Strong communication skills (technical and non-technical audiences)
• Experience in high-growth or scaling environments (Series A/B/C preferred)

Nice to Have:

• Experience scaling systems for growth
• Experience mentoring engineers
• Experience working with distributed teams