Senior Staff Engineer - Platform Services

About Albert Invent
Albert Invent is a cutting-edge AI-driven software company headquartered in Oakland, California, on a mission to empower scientists and innovators in chemistry and materials science to invent the future faster. Every day, scientists in 30+ countries use Albert to accelerate R&D with AI trained like a chemist, bringing better products to market, faster

Job Description:

Provide technical leadership and drive the architecture, design, and development of Albert Invent’s platform services, ensuring scalable, reliable, and high-performance systems. Mentor engineering teams, guide technical decisions, and collaborate across functions to deliver cohesive, impactful solutions aligned with business priorities

Responsibilities:

Technical Leadership

• Drive the architectural vision for core areas across the Albert platform.
• Own the technical roadmap for major features, ensuring alignment with business priorities and long-term platform evolution.
• Lead the design and development of highly reliable, performant, and scalable applications using modern tech stack.
• Establish durable engineering patterns and frameworks that enable product teams to move quickly with high confidence.
• Provide mentorship to Staff, Senior, and Mid-level engineers to uplevel engineering capabilities across product teams.

Execution Excellence

• Translate product and platform needs into scalable technical designs that accelerate product development.
• Solve complex, multi-system issues and guide teams through debugging, incident response, and performance improvements.
• Lead design reviews, define coding standards, and elevate system observability, reliability, and maintainability.
• Drive technical decisions involving tradeoffs between speed, quality, and scalability, bringing clarity to ambiguity.
• Identify, prioritise, and drive down technical debt that impacts product velocity and quality.

Cross-Team Influence & Collaboration

• Work with senior technical leadership to establish and uphold company-wide architectural standards and engineering practices.
• Partner closely with engineers across Product Engineering and Platform Engineering to shape platform requirements, estimate complexity, and define engineering milestones.
• Collaborate with engineering, data, ML, and infra teams to develop cohesive, well-integrated product experiences

Requirements:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent experience.
• 13+ years of software engineering experience, with 3+ years in senior technical leadership roles supporting product-oriented teams.
• Proven ability to lead end-to-end product development at scale — from concept through production rollout.
• Deep expertise in modern backend technologies, including Node.js, RESTful API design, backend services, and distributed system fundamentals, with strong proficiency across multiple programming languages.
• Strong understanding of product architecture patterns: domain-driven design, modular monoliths, micro-services, event-driven systems.
• Proficiency with SQL & NoSQL databases (PostgreSQL, DynamoDB, MongoDB, etc.).
• Significant experience with AWS services and modern cloud architectures.
• Strong product intuition — ability to understand user needs, evaluate tradeoffs, and craft solutions that balance speed with quality.
• Outstanding communication, collaboration, and organisational influence skills

Good to Have:

• Experience with modern front-end frameworks such as React.
• Experience building AI- or ML-driven user experiences.
• Experience scaling a product engineering team from 1 to N

Why Join Albert Invent

• Joining Albert Invent means becoming part of a mission-driven, fast-growing global team at the intersection of AI, data, and advanced materials science.
• You will collaborate with world-class scientists and technologists to redefine how new materials are discovered, developed, and brought to market.
• The culture is built on curiosity, collaboration, and ownership, with a strong focus on learning and impact.
• You will enjoy the opportunity to work on cutting-edge AI tools that accelerate real-world R&D and solve global challenges from sustainability to advanced manufacturing while growing your careers in a high-energy environment

For more details, please feel free to refer to www.albertinvent.com