Staff Software Engineer, Full-stack Order (AI Fluency)

About SpotOn We’re not just building restaurant tech, we’re giving independent restaurants the tools to compete and win. From our award-winning point-of-sale to AI-powered profit tools, everything we do helps operators boost profit, work smarter, and keep their best people. And every solution is backed by real humans who actually give a sh*t about helping restaurants succeed. - Named the #1 Restaurant POS by G2 (Fall 2025), based on ratings from real users - Rated the top-rated point-of-sale (POS) for restaurants, bars, retail, and small businesses by Capterra users - Awarded Great Places to Work and Built In’s Best Workplaces for multiple years running We move fast, care hard, and fight for independent restaurant operators to do what they love, and love doing it. If you’re looking to make an impact with heart and hustle, SpotOn is the place for you. We are looking for a visionary Staff Engineer to lead our technical strategy and push the boundaries of our platform. As a Staff Engineer, you won't just be writing code; you will be architecting the future of our systems. You will serve as a technical bridge between product requirements and scalable, high-performance implementation, with a specific focus on leveraging Artificial Intelligence to enhance both our product and our development velocity. ON A DAILY BASIS, YOU WILL: - Set the technical north star: You own the architecture and roadmap behind it. When the system needs to survive 10x growth or a new product bet, you're the one who sees the design through and ships it. - Become the best in the company, fast: You walk into a new codebase and domain, and within weeks, you're the person others go to for answers. - Navigate ambiguity others walk away from: We aren't doing simple CRUD work. You'll untangle distributed systems and turn "we have no idea how to do this" into a plan the team can execute. - Be a "whatever it takes" engineer: Frontend lead out? You jump in. Infra on fire? You look for a solution. An LLM feature stalls? You dig in, ship it, and write the runbook so the team owns it next time. - Drive the whole org forward: You lead ADRs, high-level code reviews, and mentorship. - Think product-first: You prioritize end-user journey and business metrics over technical purity. You push back when architecture serves itself instead of the restaurant operators we fight for. WHAT SKILLS ARE WE SEARCHING FOR? - Real-world experience: 8+ years building software that survives high-traffic production environments, with a track record of leading large-scale projects at the Staff or Principal level. - Backend mastery: Highly proficient in Golang, ideally also Python or PHP, and able to pick up a new language well enough to ship production code in weeks. - Distributed systems & API depth: Deep expertise in designing mission-critical, high-throughput REST and gRPC APIs, and the distributed systems under them. - Cloud & infra mastery: Expert-level AWS and infrastructure-as-code. You understand how your code lives in the wild, and you design for it - not around it. - Quality & observability: You've designed testing strategies covering Unit, Integration, and E2E automation for distributed environments, and treat observability (tracing, metrics, logging via OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana) as a first-class feature. - AI fluency: You've shipped LLMs into production. You understand prompt engineering, fine-tuning, and evaluation of AI outputs. You've built or are building agentic coding systems (autonomous PR reviews, automated refactoring, self-healing test suites) that make entire teams faster. - Tech debt judgment: You identify, justify, and strategically address tech debt without stalling product momentum. You know which fires to fight and which to let burn. - Solid fundamentals: Deep grasp of data structures, algorithms, and design patterns - plus the judgment to know when not to over-engineer. - Strong communication: Solid command of English (min. B2), able to explain complex tec