Staff Engineer, Software Development
Description
The Company
The Kantata Cloud for Professional Services™ gives businesses the clarity, control, and confidence they need to optimize resource planning and elevate operational performance. Our purpose-built software is helping over 2,500 professional services organizations in more than 100 countries focus on and optimize their most important asset: their people. By leveraging Kantata, professionals gain access to the information and tools they need to win more business, ensure the right people are always available at the right time, and delight clients with exceptional project delivery and outcomes.
Kantata is well-capitalized, hiring, and growing our loyal and diversified customer base faster than we ever have. Most importantly, we have a clear vision of where we’re going and how to get there. (Hint: It involves you.) Did we mention that Kantata is also an awesome place to work? You’ll have the opportunity to work in a dynamic environment with a team that loves what they do. A talented team, great perks, and an amazing culture = an employee-rated Best Place to Work!
About the Opportunity
As a Staff Engineer at Kantata, you will drive complex, cross-functional technical projects from conception to deployment, defining technical strategy and architecture for major systems and products. You’ll make impactful technical decisions across multiple teams, mentor other engineers, and foster a culture of engineering excellence. This role is pivotal in shaping our technology direction, solving critical challenges, and ensuring our systems are scalable, reliable, and secure. You’ll collaborate closely with product managers, designers, and stakeholders, champion innovation, and embody Kantata’s core values.
Primary Responsibilities
- Technical Strategy & Leadership: Drive technical decisions that impact multiple teams or the entire engineering organization. Identify and solve the most critical and ambiguous technical challenges.
- System Design & Architecture: Design scalable, reliable, and maintainable systems that serve as foundations for products. Create architectural blueprints and technical roadmaps.
- Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner with product managers, designers, and other stakeholders to define technical requirements. Influence product direction based on technical feasibility and opportunities.
- Innovation: Research and evaluate new technologies, tools, and methodologies. Drive adoption of engineering best practices and standards.
- Code & Technical Contributions: Write high-quality, exemplary code that serves as a model for others. Debug and resolve the most complex technical issues. Contribute to open-source projects or internal tools that benefit the broader engineering team.
What You Bring to this Role
- 8+ years of functional experience, including at least 5 years in a technical leadership role.
- Expertise in system design, architecture, and technical strategy for large-scale products.
- Advanced proficiency in relevant programming languages, frameworks, and tools.
- Experience ensuring performance, security, and reliability in complex systems.
- Strong communication skills, able to convey technical concepts to diverse audiences.
- Demonstrated commitment to innovation, continuous improvement, and engineering best practices.
- Proven ability to troubleshoot, debug, and optimize system performance, ensuring the reliability and efficiency of engineering solutions.
Additional Required Experience:
- Graph Database Expertise:
- Skills: Deep experience with modern graph database systems (e.g., Neo4j, TigerGraph, AWS Neptune, ArangoDB, JanusGraph).
- Data Engineering (Pipelines & ETL):
- Skills: Expert-level knowledge of building reliable, scalable data pipelines (using tools like Kafka, Spark, Airflow) to ingest and transform messy, unstructured data (like SOWs, email transcripts, project docs) into a structured graph format
- Natural Language Processing (NLP):
- Skills: Practical experience with techniques like Named Entity Recognition (NER), Relationship Extraction (RE), and Text Classification to automatically extract entities and relationships from text documents and map them to the Knowledge Graph schema.
- Vector Databases (RAG Foundation):
- Experience with vector embeddings and vector stores (e.g., Pinecone, Milvus, Chroma) necessary to build the Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) components that sit on top of the Knowledge Graph.
- MLOps / MLOps Platforms:
- Experience in deploying, monitoring, and scaling ML models in production (e.g., using SageMaker, MLflow) is critical for serving the intelligent insights derived from the graph.
- Agentic Systems & Orchestration:
- Skills: Direct, hands-on experience designing, developing, and deploying AI agents and multi-agent systems. Proficiency with modern agent orchestration frameworks (e.g., LangChain, Microsoft AutoGen, CrewAI, Haystack) and the ability to define tool integration (APIs) and complex decision-making loops for autonomous execution.
Compensation
The base salary range for this position is USD $128,000 – USD $165,000.
This position is eligible to participate in a Company Wide Bonus Plan.
*The above represents the expected salary range for this job requisition. Other compensation considerations include: location, relevant experience and other job-related factors.
Our Philosophy
We know every company can be successful with the right technology and when people are at the core. We believe that we’re better together - that working hand-in-hand brings the best thoughts to the table and creates an environment of learning and growth. Here, you’ll enjoy:
- An intentionally engaging and collaborative culture - ditch the silo!
- Strong work-life balance that’s a true focus of the company
- The chance to learn from some of the best people in the business
- A vibrant, collaborative and devoted team, who still makes time for fun
At Kantata, we strive to create an inclusive workplace that upholds the dignity of all people. We value, respect and celebrate everyone’s unique strengths from all different walks of life. As we continue to cultivate diversity within the company, our product (and people!) innovation continues to flourish.
Kantata is an Equal Opportunity Employer.