Staff Engineer (Platform)
•Later· 14h
💻 Engineering⏰ Full-time🎯 Lead / Principal💰 $175k-250k🇺🇸 Boston, USA
14h ago
Captivateiq·5 months ago
CaptivateIQ is transforming the way companies plan, manage, and optimize sales performance. We started by revolutionizing incentive compensation management, and now we're expanding our platform to solve broader sales planning challenges. Recognized by industry analysts like Forrester and G2 and backed by top-tier investors, including Sequoia, ICONIQ, Accel, and Sapphire Ventures, we empower high-growth companies like Netflix, Figma, and Stripe with the flexibility and insights needed to drive revenue performance.
The Modeling Platform team is the backbone of every product in CaptivateIQ's modeling suite and sits at the core of CaptivateIQ's multi-year product strategy. This team is a force multiplier — the components, interfaces, and infrastructure it builds are what let every product engineering team ship modeling experiences fast, without re-solving foundational problems each time.
The team's surface area spans service-layer APIs, a modeling SDK, and extensible frontend components — and our goal is to evolve this into a self-service framework: simple enough to ship new modeling products at a fraction of today's build time, reliable enough that product teams don't think about the plumbing, and opinionated enough that they aren't re-solving the same problems every iteration. We're also building this as an AI-native platform, with first-class access and support for AI agents to build alongside human engineers.
We're looking for a Staff Software Engineer to own the technical direction of that evolution — a technical leader with strong engineering chops who embodies CaptivateIQ's values of ownership, bias toward action, and delivering real impact. You'll set the architectural direction for how the platform evolves, drive the multi-year technical strategy (with your EM and senior EPD leadership as partners, not gatekeepers), and make the tradeoffs that determine how product teams build on top of it.
It's a highly collaborative role — you'll work daily with cross-functional partners (Product, Design, EM) and with the product engineering teams building on the platform. You'll also partner closely with the SmartGrid team — CaptivateIQ's proprietary DAG-based computation engine that powers the framework underneath — helping shape architectural direction for the Modeling Platform Pillar as a whole. You'll drive technical alignment across teams, and invest deeply in coaching and developing engineers toward senior and staff-level impact.
Own the technical direction of the modeling platform's framework and SDK layer, partnering closely with the SmartGrid team on the underlying computation engine
Own and evolve the platform's framework, SDK, and interfaces — including agentic/tool-based interfaces for AI consumers — turning today's API surface into a self-service framework with the extensibility points that let internal teams build modeling products fast
Make the platform-level tradeoffs that shape it: what belongs in the framework vs. a product team's responsibility, build vs. buy, refactor vs. patch, flexibility vs. opinionated speed
Operate with high ownership and autonomy — drive ambiguous or contested decisions forward by pulling in the right stakeholders early rather than letting them stall, and own the outcomes months later, good or bad
Set the multi-year technical strategy for the modeling platform, in partnership with your EM, PM, Design, and senior EPD leadership
Drive technical alignment across teams — build the credibility and relationships that align consuming product teams around the platform's roadmap
Stay hands-on as a backend-primary fullstack engineer — the platform spans backend APIs, SDKs, and the frontend components product teams extend and build modeling experiences on top of
Grow and develop engineers on the team — coach toward senior and staff-level impact, set the technical bar through design leadership and review standards, and provide architectural guidance that scales beyond your own output
8+ years of professional software engineering experience with progression into staff-level technical leadership
Strong Python fundamentals with production experience in Django or similar Python web frameworks
Demonstrated experience owning a platform or framework layer — not just a service — that multiple internal teams built on top of
Strong backend engineering foundation with hands-on experience building frontend components that other engineering teams consume, extend, and build on top of
Track record of setting multi-year technical strategy for a platform or major system, with evidence of the strategy shipping and delivering impact
Track record of growing engineers to the next level — mentoring, coaching, and leading their technical development toward senior and staff-level impact
Familiarity with Go, for collaboration with the SmartGrid computation engine team
Experience designing interfaces for AI agent consumption — tool-use schemas, MCP-style protocols, structured function-calling interfaces
Familiarity with columnar data formats (Apache Arrow, Parquet) and OLAP storage engines (ClickHouse, DuckDB, or similar)
Working knowledge of DAG-based or dependency-graph-driven computation systems
Experience designing SDKs or self-service developer platforms consumed by multiple internal teams
Experience at a B2B SaaS company during periods of significant growth or platform expansion
Familiarity with sales performance management, incentive compensation, or adjacent enterprise domains