Staff Software Engineer

About the role

At Sonatype, we're building the technology that powers secure software development for thousands of organizations around the world. As a Staff Software Engineer, you'll play a key role in developing and maintaining the core services that enable our customers to provision, purchase, and license our products reliably and at scale.

This is a highly strategic and hands-on engineering role for someone who enjoys solving and owning complex technical challenges, writing high-quality code, and collaborating with experienced engineers. While this is not a people management position, you'll have opportunities to mentor teammates, share technical expertise, and help elevate engineering best practices across the team.

You'll work closely with a collaborative group of engineers, contributing to the design, implementation, and continuous improvement of critical backend services that support our commercial platform.

What you'll do:

Design, develop, test, and maintain software that powers product provisioning, licensing, and purchasing capabilities across Sonatype's platform.

Build scalable, reliable, and maintainable backend services using modern engineering practices.

Contribute to technical design discussions and help drive high-quality architectural decisions.

Collaborate closely with engineers, product managers, and cross-functional teams to deliver impactful features.

Write clean, well-tested, and maintainable code while participating in code reviews.

Troubleshoot production issues and continuously improve system performance, reliability, and scalability.

Mentor and coach other engineers through technical guidance, design reviews, and knowledge sharing while remaining deeply involved in day-to-day development.

Contribute to automation, infrastructure improvements, and cloud-native engineering practices.

What success looks like:

You deliver high-quality, maintainable software that reliably supports Sonatype's provisioning, licensing, and purchasing capabilities.

You become a trusted technical contributor who proactively solves complex engineering problems.

You collaborate effectively across engineering teams, helping drive technical excellence and delivering value to customers.

You mentor and support fellow engineers through thoughtful feedback, technical guidance, and code reviews while remaining a highly productive individual contributor.

You continuously improve the reliability, scalability, and maintainability of the systems your team owns.

You embrace ownership, take initiative, and consistently deliver meaningful impact through hands-on software development.

What you'll bring:

6+ years of professional software engineering experience developing production-grade applications.

Direct experience using agent-driven development and code review.

Strong experience building backend applications with Java.

Experience with additional programming languages like Golang and Python.

Experience working with cloud platforms, particularly AWS.

Hands-on experience with containerization and infrastructure technologies such as Docker, Terraform, and Ansible.

Experience with build and dependency management tools such as Maven.

Experience working with relational databases such as PostgreSQL or MySQL.

Experience with event-driven architectures and microservices.

Strong understanding of software design principles, testing, debugging, and distributed systems.

A collaborative mindset with excellent communication skills and a passion for mentoring fellow engineers.

A desire to remain highly technical and hands-on while contributing technical leadership within the team.

It’d be great if you also had:

Exposure to Microsoft Azure and/or Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

Experience building or supporting commercial platforms involving licensing, provisioning, subscription management, or purchasing systems.

Experience working in Agile development environments.

Familiarity with DevOps and CI/CD best practices.