Staff Software Engineer (Python)

HireRight is the premier global background screening and workforce solutions provider. We bring clarity and confidence to vetting and hiring decisions through integrated, tailored solutions, driving a higher standard of accuracy in everything we do. Combining in-house talent, personalized services, and proprietary technology, we ensure the best candidate experience possible. PBSA accredited and based in Nashville, Tennessee, we offer expertise from our regional centers across 200 countries and territories in the Americas, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. Our commitment to get it right every time, everywhere, makes us the trusted partner of businesses and organizations worldwide. 

As a Staff Software Engineer, you will own technical direction for a product area that spans several teams, lead the design of our most complex systems, and help shape engineering practice across the department.

You will: 

• Set technical direction and architecture for systems that span multiple teams, and write it down: design docs, RFCs, architecture decision records
• Lead the design and delivery of the hardest, highest-risk projects, while staying hands-on in the code
• Find and drive the cross-team technical work no single team owns: platform improvements, migrations, reliability
• Raise the bar for reliability, security, and operability across services, including observability, incident response, and postmortems
• Make long-term technology and build-vs-buy decisions, and explain the tradeoffs to engineers and leadership alike
• Mentor senior engineers and grow the next generation of staff engineers
• Partner with engineering, product, and design leadership to shape the roadmap from the technical side

We typically look for 8 or more years of software engineering experience, including several years leading technical work across teams. We care more about the scope and impact of that experience than the exact number of years.

Technologies

Our technology environment will evolve, and we care more about engineering fundamentals than a perfect keyword match.

Mandatory Skills

• Extensive backend engineering experience, with a track record of designing, building, and operating production systems at scale
• Deep production experience with Python, or another backend language with the willingness to work in Python day to day
• Experience designing APIs and service boundaries across multiple teams and services, including versioning and backward compatibility
• Expert knowledge of SQL and relational databases, preferably PostgreSQL: data modeling, query performance, and schema migrations at scale
• Experience designing distributed and asynchronous systems: task queues (Celery or similar), message brokers, event-driven architecture
• Experience architecting cloud infrastructure on AWS (EC2, S3, EKS/Kubernetes), including cost, security, and reliability tradeoffs
• Track record of improving testing, CI/CD, and release practices across teams, not only your own
• Excellent technical writing: architecture docs, RFCs, tradeoff analyses, and postmortems that change how others decide
• Ability to navigate ambiguity, influence without authority, and partner effectively with senior stakeholders
• Deep, hands-on experience with AI-driven solutions — not as a user, but as a builder. You follow where the technology is going, form opinions, and bring that edge into the work
• Proven ability to lead complex, cross-team technical initiatives from design through completion

Nice To Have Skills

• Experience with Temporal or other workflow engines (Step Functions, Airflow, Cadence)
• Experience with infrastructure as code (AWS CDK, AWS Landing Zone Accelerator, or similar)
• Experience in regulated domains or with handling sensitive personal data
• TypeScript and React experience, for full-stack contributions
• Experience building or customising AI agent workflows for engineering (agent instructions, skills, automated review or triage)

You do not need to have used our exact stack. You do need to be able to learn quickly, reason deeply, and build responsibly.

How we work

We value: 

• Curiosity: ask better questions
• Simplicity: remove unnecessary complexity
• Ownership: if we build it, we own it
• Lean thinking: small batches, fast feedback, less waste
• Craft: quality matters
• Direct feedback: clarity is kindness
• Smart risk: experiment responsibly
• Data-informed decisions: use evidence without becoming trapped by it
• Agentic leverage: use modern tools to increase impact
• Continuous improvement: make the system better every cycle

Final thought

Hiring and workforce decisions affect companies, candidates, communities, and lives. The systems behind those decisions should be accurate, trustworthy, efficient, humane, and modern.

We are looking for engineers who take pride in craft, own what they build, and make the people around them better.

If that sounds like you, we would love to meet you.