Principal Software Engineer
•Skimmer· 1d
💻 Engineering⏰ Full-time🎯 Lead / Principal🇺🇸 USA
1d ago
Onebrief·1 day ago
Onebrief builds collaboration and AI-powered workflow software for military planning and operational coordination.
Today, many critical planning workflows still rely on fragmented systems, static documents, and disconnected tools that make collaboration and decision-making unnecessarily difficult. Onebrief brings modern software, AI, and real-time collaboration into those environments, helping teams operate with greater clarity, coordination, and adaptability in situations where decisions carry real-world consequences.
We are a distributed team of builders from military, operational, and technology backgrounds who care deeply about improving how important work gets done. Some team members work remotely, while others work directly alongside customers in operational environments around the world.
Founded in 2019, Onebrief is backed by leading investors including General Catalyst, Battery Ventures, Insight Partners, Sapphire Ventures, and Human Capital. Valued at more than $2 billion, we continue to invest in product innovation, AI capabilities, and team growth.
We're hiring a Staff Software Engineer to tackle some of the hardest technical problems at Onebrief — the kind that don't yet have a clear owner, a defined scope, or an obvious solution. We operate in a squad-based model: small, focused teams that form around outcomes and dissolve when the work is done. At the Staff level, you're not just effective within that model; you're one of the people who makes it work. You define technical direction before squads spin up, build the foundations that squads depend on, and bring coherence to decisions that would otherwise fragment across teams.
Our platform spans a modern full stack: a React/TypeScript frontend, Node.js backend services, cloud-native infrastructure, and authentication and identity systems. You'll operate across all of it, not just as a contributor, but as someone who shapes how we build.
You're energized by problems that are technically hard and organizationally complex. You don't wait for scope to be handed to you. You identify the highest-leverage work and pull it into focus. You've seen enough systems succeed and fail to have strong opinions, but you hold them lightly enough to change your mind when the evidence warrants it. You treat AI tooling not just as a productivity multiplier but as something worth thinking carefully about at the system level: how it changes the way teams build, review, and reason about code. You care deeply about the engineers around you and measure your own success partly by how much better they get.
Define and drive cross-squad technical strategy, identifying systemic gaps, proposing architectural direction, and seeing complex initiatives through from framing to delivery.
Shape the conditions for squads to succeed: establish durable abstractions, shared patterns, and platform primitives that reduce friction across teams rather than within one.
Operate in the highest-ambiguity spaces: problems that aren't yet well-formed enough to assign to a squad, where your job is to bring clarity and make them tractable.
Drive architectural decisions that outlast any single squad rotation, balancing long-term system health with the pragmatic pace of a high-velocity org.
Establish and evolve engineering norms: how the team uses AI-assisted development, what good code review looks like, and how we reason about build vs. buy vs. adopt decisions.
Mentor and elevate engineers across squads, not through formal programs, but through the quality of your reviews, your RFCs, and how you show up in technical conversations.
Partner with product and engineering leadership to shape the roadmap from a technical perspective, surfacing constraints and opportunities that aren't visible without deep system knowledge.
12+ years of software engineering experience, with a track record of technical ownership that spans teams, not just projects
Demonstrated ability to set architectural direction at the org or platform level, not just within a team's scope
Fluency across the full stack, with the depth to go from frontend architecture to infrastructure trade-offs as the problem demands
Experience building in a squad or rotation-based model, or the clear instincts of someone who would thrive in one
Strong understanding of distributed systems, API design, data modeling, and cloud-native infrastructure at scale
Active and sophisticated use of AI coding tools, with a point of view on how they should be used well, not just used
Exceptional communication: the ability to write RFCs that get alignment, give feedback that lands, and make complex trade-offs legible to non-technical stakeholders
Comfort in ambiguity: you make progress without waiting for full clarity, and you bring others along rather than disappearing into a problem
Nice to Have Qualifications
Background in mission-critical or high-compliance domains (FedRAMP, SOC2, DoD)
Experience with authentication and identity infrastructure at scale (OIDC, SAML, federated identity)
Prior experience in a high-growth B2B SaaS environment scaling through significant inflection points
Familiarity with event-driven architectures and the trade-offs of async-first system design
Frontend: React, TypeScript, Vite, shared component libraries, client-side observability
Backend: Node.js, PostgreSQL, Redis, secure RESTful APIs, distributed services
Authentication & Authorization: Keycloak, OpenID Connect (OIDC), SAML 2.0, OAuth 2.0, ABAC, JWT, federated identity provider integrations
Infrastructure: Kubernetes, AWS, Terraform, CI/CD pipelines, container security and secrets management
Integrations: CSV/Excel/KML importers, PDF exports, DoD and enterprise data systems, secure API gateways, auditing pipelines
Notice to Third Party Recruitment Agencies
Please note that Onebrief does not accept unsolicited resumes from recruiters or employment agencies. In the absence of an executed Recruitment Services Agreement, there will be no obligation to any referral compensation or recruiter fee. In the event a recruiter or agency submits a resume or candidate without an agreement Onebrief explicitly reserves the right to pursue and hire those candidate(s) without any financial obligation to the recruiter or agency. Any unsolicited resumes, including those submitted to hiring managers, shall be deemed the property of Onebrief.