Senior Staff Software Engineer

Job Description

Dispel builds secure, private network infrastructure for critical industries. The people who depend on our products need reliable, auditable, and secure access to sensitive systems, and the engineers who build those products need to understand that context deeply. At IC7, you are one of those engineers.

As Senior Staff Software Engineer, you will own the full arc of our most consequential technical initiatives: from architecture and planning through coordination, testing strategy, and delivery. You define the methods and procedures your team uses. You debug the hardest problems Dispel encounters. You make every engineer around you measurably better.

This role sits at the intersection of software engineering, cloud infrastructure, networking, and on-premises virtualization. You will not just write excellent software; you will understand and influence the infrastructure layer that software runs on, the network layer it communicates through, and the security properties that make our customers trust us with their most sensitive operations — and that understanding drives the technical decisions you make, grounded in what customers are trying to accomplish, the operational pain they face, and the reliability they depend on.

Engineering at Dispel is a collaborative effort and those that show up trying to get things done and help others will receive support from the team. Dispel is growing quickly and for that reason you should be prepared to handle a significant amount of ownership and deal with some amount of chaos. If you have not been in an environment like this before you would do well to try and convince us that you can handle it during your interviews.

Requirements

Responsibilities:

Execution (Primary Focus)

System Design and Architecture

• Own design, planning, estimation, testing, and coordination for team projects spanning multiple quarters.
• Understand the broad architecture of Dispel's entire system — software, networking, cloud, and on-prem infrastructure — and produce comprehensive architecture diagrams, technical proposals, and design documents that clarify ambiguous problem spaces and earn stakeholder alignment.
• Evaluate major architectural tradeoffs across performance, scalability, security, maintainability, and engineering velocity, with particular attention to network and infrastructure implications.

Complex Problem Solving and Delivery

• Deliver complex systems on time and on budget, taking personal responsibility for the risks associated with your team's work.
• Debug and resolve the most difficult technical problems Dispel encounters, including issues that span software, infrastructure, and network layers.
• Determine and own the testing strategy for your team, ensuring appropriate coverage and quality across all layers of the stack.
• Write software that sets the quality standard — clear, maintainable, well-tested, and designed to last, regardless of the language or layer.

Cross-Team Technical Leadership

• Coordinate with other teams on cross-cutting technical issues, including infrastructure, security, and network architecture.
• Provide technical advice that shapes decisions across the engineering organization.
• Identify and communicate technical risks early and drive mitigation across team boundaries.

Enabling Others (Secondary Focus)

Mentorship and Team Development

• Make other engineers better through substantive proposals, reviews, architectural guidance, technical documentation, and direct mentorship — leading projects with multiple contributors, keeping delivery on track, and raising the quality of every engineer's contribution.
• Determine the methods and procedures used by your team and continuously improve them.
• Communicate effectively within and outside of the engineering organization — from technical peers to executive stakeholders.

Reliability, Security, and Quality

• Actively work to refine your team's approach to security, reliability, privacy, and compliance — particularly as they relate to network infrastructure and cloud environments.
• Champion operational excellence and ensure the systems your team ships are observable, maintainable, and resilient.

Qualifications:

• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience with a demonstrated track record of leading team projects involving multiple engineers.
• Strong proficiency in software development across multiple languages and paradigms — you are effective in the languages your team uses and can pick up new ones as needed.
• Comfortable using coding agents (e.g., GitHub Copilot, Claude Code) as part of your daily workflow — Addy Osmani’s article Agentic Engineering (Agentic Engineering ) roughly describes Dispels basic stance on AI usage by engineers.
• Solid understanding of network architecture: routing, switching, VPN protocols, DNS, and firewalls.
• Hands-on experience with cloud platforms — AWS and/or Azure — including networking constructs such as VPCs, subnets, security groups, transit gateways, and private endpoints.
• Experience with on-premises virtualization: hypervisors (ESXi, KVM, Hyper-V, or similar), VM lifecycle management.
• Demonstrated ability to own cross-team projects and navigate organizational complexity to deliver results.
• Experience producing technical proposals, architecture documents, and system designs that inform and align diverse stakeholders.
• Proven track record of setting team-level engineering standards and driving their adoption.
• Deep understanding of distributed systems: databases, caches, queues, event-driven architectures, and cloud infrastructure.
• Depending on your background you should have a deeper understanding of one or more of the following areas:
• Full Stack
• Proficient in TypeScript and modern web development.
• Comfortable working across frontend and backend layers of the stack.
• Backend
• Strong proficiency in one or more of: Python, TypeScript, Go.
• Must have been deeply involved with complex, production-grade APIs and services.
• Strong understanding of cloud execution environments and how architectural decisions affect them.
• Must have strong understanding of databases, caches, queues, events, and workers.
• DevOps
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform or similar) and CI/CD pipelines.
• Familiarity with container orchestration and cloud-native deployment patterns.
• DevEx experience.
• Networking
• Deep experience designing and operating network infrastructure, VPN systems, or secure access platforms.
• Strong understanding of network security principles and hardening practices.

Bonus Points

• Strong judgment around security, reliability, privacy, and compliance in production systems — ideally in regulated or security-sensitive environments.
• Familiarity with compliance frameworks relevant to Dispel's customers: FedRAMP, SOC 2, IEC 62443, or similar.

Benefits

We Offer:

• $194,000 – 216,000 salary range
• 401(k) w/ company match
• Unlimited paid time off
• Parental leave
• Full medical, dental, vision insurance
• Life insurance
• Disability insurance
• Health savings account
• Performance bonus and equity eligible
• Remote work