Staff software engineer, enterprise AI platform

🚀 About WRITER WRITER is where the world's leading enterprises orchestrate AI-powered work. Our vision is to expand human capacity through superintelligence. And we're proving it's possible – through powerful, trustworthy AI that unites IT and business teams together to unlock enterprise-wide transformation. With WRITER's end-to-end platform, hundreds of companies like Mars, Marriott, Uber, and Vanguard are building and deploying AI agents that are grounded in their company's data and fueled by WRITER's enterprise-grade LLMs. Valued at $1.9B and backed by industry-leading investors including Premji Invest, Radical Ventures, and ICONIQ Growth, WRITER is rapidly cementing its position as the leader in enterprise generative AI. Founded in 2020 with office hubs in San Francisco, New York City, Austin, Chicago, and London, our team thinks big and moves fast, and we're looking for smart, hardworking builders and scalers to join us on our journey to create a better future of work with AI. 📐 About the role We’re looking for a staff software engineer to join our enterprise admin team. This team owns the foundational systems that enable large organisations to securely adopt and operate Writer at scale, including identity, authentication, authorization, administration, and billing foundations. You'll design and build the foundational platform services that our largest customers depend on for secure, reliable access to Writer across their organisations. These systems power enterprise-grade access control, permissions, seat management, usage governance, and subscription infrastructure. The problems are non-trivial: multi-tenancy, distributed systems, compliance constraints, scalability, and long-term architectural maintainability. This is a hands-on engineering role for someone who enjoys owning systems end-to-end, from architecture and design through production reliability and iteration. This role is hybrid, based out of our London hub. You’ll report to an engineering director. 🦸🏻‍♀️ What you’ll do - Design and build robust, scalable services for enterprise administration, billing, identity management, authentication, and authorization - Make meaningful system design decisions, own the architecture of core platform components from initial design through production - Build and optimise high-performance APIs and distributed services that operate reliably at enterprise scale - Collaborate with product managers and cross-functional engineering teams to translate complex business and compliance requirements into well-designed technical solutions - Partner with DevOps teams on continuous deployment, logging, and monitoring; ensuring top-tier performance and reliability - Drive improvements in observability, reliability, deployment workflows, and operational excellence - Navigate ambiguity, take loosely defined problem spaces and turn them into well-structured, maintainable implementations - Raise the bar on code quality, testing, documentation, and long-term maintainability ⭐️ What you need - 7+ years of hands-on software engineering experience building production systems end-to-end with extremely strong proficiency with Python and functional programming - Strong system design skills, you can whiteboard a distributed architecture, reason about trade-offs, and make pragmatic decisions under uncertainty - Experience building microservices and RESTful APIs in cloud environments (AWS, GCP, or Azure), including containerization with Docker and Kubernetes - Solid grasp of database systems (e.g., PostgreSQL), event-driven architectures, and distributed systems fundamentals (availability, fault tolerance, operational safety) - Comfort operating in ambiguity, you drive clarity rather than waiting for complete specifications, and you drive clarity for yourself and the team - Experience coding with AI tools to move faster while maintaining high standards for correctness, security, and maintainability - A "Connect" mindset, thriving in collaborative settings where you actively engage with cross-functional teams and mentor junior engineers to achieve shared goals - A "Challenge" spirit, demonstrating exceptional problem-solving skills to tackle complex technical hurdles and proactively suggest innovative improvements to our systems and processes - An “Own” mindset, you take full accountability for outcomes from design through production, and you raise the bar on quality and maintainability Nice to have - Experience in identity and access management, authentication (SSO, SAML, OIDC), and authorization models (RBAC, ABAC, policy engines) - Experience building billing, subscription, or metering systems at scale - Background in multi-tenant enterprise SaaS platforms - Experience with functional Scala is a strong plus 🍩 Benefits & perks (UK full-time employees): - Generous PTO, plus company holidays - Comprehensive medical and dental insurance - Paid parental leave for all parents (12 weeks) - Fertility and family planning support - Early-detection cancer testing through Galleri https://www.galleri.com/partner/writer - Competitive pension scheme and company contribution - Annual work-life stipends for: - Wellness stipend for gym, massage/chiropractor, personal training, etc. - Learning and development stipend - Company-wide off-sites and team off-sites - Competitive compensation and company stock options