Staff Software Engineer

Job Description

Location

On-site / Hybrid (Austin, TX)

Position Summary

TrendAI is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to lead the architectural evolution of our on-premises network security management appliance and its bridge to our cloud microservices platform. The role is anchored in the appliance backend, a mature Java codebase running on WildFly (EJBs, JPA, JMS, JAX-RS, SOAP, and REST) with MariaDB and ColumnStore data tiers. You will lead the modernization of this monolith, untangling complex subsystems and optimizing high-throughput, multi-threaded services.

This is a full-stack technical leadership role. You will deliver modern web management surfaces with React and TypeScript, and expand into companion cloud microservices built with Go and Node on AWS (Lambda, DynamoDB, S3, AWS IoT). As a Staff IC, you will own technical direction, mentor engineers across teams, and champion AI-augmented development workflows to accelerate delivery while maintaining enterprise reliability.

Responsibilities

• Lead backend architecture and engineering across our flagship on-premises management appliance, evolving a large-scale Java codebase that handles distributed device configuration, policy compilation, health monitoring, and high-volume event ingestion.
• Modernize and modularize legacy subsystems within the Java EE / WildFly monolith: refactor tight couplings into clean, testable service boundaries and well-defined internal interfaces without disrupting customer upgrade paths or operational uptime.
• Own data tier architecture and performance across relational and analytical data stores (MariaDB, ColumnStore, RDS), including query optimization, connection pooling, transactional integrity, and automated schema migrations across release boundaries.
• Deliver cohesive full-stack capabilities, partnering backend APIs with modern web user interfaces (React, TypeScript) to provide responsive, enterprise-grade fleet management experiences.
• Design and evolve high-performance RESTful APIs alongside long-standing SOAP services, ensuring robust backward compatibility and interoperability between on-premises appliances, endpoints, and external management consumers.
• Progressively architect, build, and integrate companion cloud microservices (primarily Go, alongside Node.js and Python) on AWS using event-driven and serverless architectures (Lambda, API Gateway, S3, DynamoDB, RDS, AWS IoT) to connect on-prem appliance fleets into the broader cloud platform.
• Investigate and resolve high-complexity distributed systems failures, concurrency issues, memory leaks, thread contention, and performance bottlenecks across the stack using JVM profilers, database query analyzers, thread/heap dumps, and Linux system telemetry.
• Establish and champion AI-augmented software engineering practices: direct agentic coding assistants (e.g., Claude Code) on complex refactoring and feature tasks, set architectural guardrails, and mandate rigorous validation standards so AI velocity enhances codebase health.
• Architect resilience and fault tolerance into fleet-management subsystems, including high availability (HA), failover semantics, cluster replication, and disaster recovery.
• Author comprehensive automated test suites spanning JUnit backend unit/integration tests, Go testing packages, database test tiers, contract tests (Pact), and end-to-end browser workflows (Playwright), raising code quality across legacy and modern repositories.
• Collaborate across organizational boundaries, partnering with architects, Product Management, QA, and Sustaining to scope technical initiatives, negotiate interface contracts, and align engineering roadmaps.
• Mentor and elevate engineers across the organization through deep design reviews, high-leverage code reviews, architectural RFCs, and technical brownbags.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience designing, building, and maintaining enterprise-grade production software, with significant depth in backend systems.
• Deep expertise in Java and the JVM ecosystem in large, multi-threaded, high-concurrency codebases (memory management, garbage collection tuning, thread safety, profiling).
• Solid experience with enterprise Java architectures (WildFly or comparable application servers; Java EE / Jakarta EE technologies such as EJBs, JPA, JMS, JAX-RS).
• Strong relational and analytical database architecture skills (MariaDB, MySQL, ColumnStore, or PostgreSQL): schema design, index optimization, complex query tuning, transaction management, and safe, zero-downtime migration strategies.
• Proven full-stack capabilities: hands-on experience designing and implementing modern front-end applications (React, TypeScript, modern CSS/build tooling) alongside RESTful APIs.
• Experience des