Senior Staff Engineer

About Us
Hiver offers teams the simplest way to offer outstanding and personalized customer service. As a customer service solution built on Gmail, Hiver is intuitive, super easy to learn, and delightful to use. Hiver is used by thousands of teams at some of the best-known companies in the world to provide attentive, empathetic, and human service to their customers at scale. We're a top-rated product on G2 and rank very highly on customer satisfaction.

At Hiver, we obsess about being world-class at everything we do. Our product is loved by our customers, our content engages a very wide audience, our customer service is one of the highest rated in the industry, and our sales team is as driven about doing right by our customers as they are by hitting their numbers. We're profitably run and are backed by notable investors. K1 Capital led our most recent round of $27 million. Before that, we raised from Kalaari Capital, Kae Capital, and Citrix Startup Accelerator.

Opportunity
As a Senior Staff Engineer at Hiver, you will play a pivotal role in shaping the future of our platform and technology landscape. You will operate as a senior technical leader — driving architectural strategy, establishing engineering excellence across teams, and influencing product direction at scale.

Hiver processes over 5 million emails daily for thousands of active users — and as we continue to grow rapidly, you'll lead efforts to build highly scalable, intelligent, and resilient systems that power this growth. This is a hands-on and strategic role where you will architect complex systems, mentor other Staff Engineers and Technical Leads, and champion technical innovation across the company.

What you will be working on?
Strategic Technical Leadership

• Define and evolve Hiver's technical architecture and long-term technology roadmap in alignment with business strategy.
• Lead architectural design reviews and ensure coherent technical direction across multiple product and platform teams.
• Partner with senior leadership across all functions to make strategic build vs. buy, scale vs. optimize, and AI adoption decisions.
• Drive technical vision-setting for next-generation AI-driven capabilities across the product suite.

AI and Systems Architecture

• Design and scale advanced Generative AI and Machine Learning solutions integrated with Hiver's core workflows.
• Build frameworks to improve system scalability, resilience, and observability for high-throughput email and data processing.
• Ensure architectural decisions are guided by performance, maintainability, and cost efficiency principles.

Engineering Excellence & Mentorship

• Set and enforce engineering-wide standards for system design, code quality, and technical documentation.
• Mentor and coach Staff Engineers, Tech Leads, and Senior Engineers, helping them grow as system thinkers and problem solvers.
• Act as the final technical reviewer for complex or high-risk projects, reducing uncertainty and ensuring timely delivery.
• Build a culture of engineering excellence that values clarity, simplicity, and accountability.

Cross-Functional Influence

• Collaborate closely with Product, Data, and Design teams to translate business goals into technically feasible and scalable solutions.
• Drive consensus and alignment on key architectural trade-offs across multiple teams and stakeholders.
• Lead post-incident reviews and proactively drive initiatives that improve system reliability and developer productivity.

Innovation & Technical Thought Leadership

• Champion emerging technologies — AI, automation, data analytics — to create business leverage.
• Promote a culture of continuous innovation, experimentation, and learning within engineering.
• Represent Hiver's engineering excellence in external forums, conferences, and open-source communities.

What we are looking for?

• 12+ years of total experience in software engineering with at least 5+ years in architecture or technical leadership roles.
• 3+ years of experience leading Staff-level in large-scale distributed systems.
• Extensive expertise in AI/ML (including Generative AI), with a deep understanding of model lifecycle management and deployment.
• Proven experience architecting high-availability, large-scale SaaS platforms in cloud environments (AWS, GCP or Azure).
• Strong foundation in Python or Java, object-oriented design, and system performance optimization.
• Advanced understanding of distributed systems, data architecture, and event-driven design patterns.
• Experience managing technical strategy and decision-making across multiple teams or product areas.
• Demonstrated ability to navigate ambiguity, build consensus, and influence without direct authority.
• Passion for mentoring and developing senior engineering talent and shaping engineering culture at scale.