Senior/Staff Software Engineer
About this role
👋 About Opus
Opus is the first training platform built for the service workforce: the 110M Americans who are the backbone of the American economy; the people behind every meal served, every car washed, every guest checked in. For too long, software providers haven't built tools that actually develop and invest in this workforce. We have. Opus gives operators the platform they need to build high performing teams and power the workforce that powers their business.
We're a team of service industry veterans and technology professionals who care about building simple, accessible technology for a workforce that's multi-lingual, multi-generational, and away from a computer all day. Rachael, our CEO, spent over a decade running operations and people in hospitality and comes from a family of restaurant veterans herself.
📈 Our traction
Hundreds of brands in hospitality and beyond run their training on Opus, including Blaze Pizza, Smashburger, José Andrés Group, Salt & Straw, Just Salad, and Craveworthy Brands (21+ brands and counting)
We're Series B, doubled ARR last year (>$1M per engineer), and cash flow profitable
1M+ active users, 15,000+ locations, 98% course completion
15,000+ people train on Opus every day, in over 100 languages
100% of our pilots have converted to paying customers
👩💻 Our team
We keep our engineering team small and highly leveraged: 6 engineers, 2 designers, and our CTO. There's no product manager standing between an idea and the customer: engineers scope their own projects, build them, ship them, and usually sit in on the customer calls that shaped them in the first place. A lot of us have been working together for close to a decade now. Average tenure on the team is 3+ years. One value drives a lot of our best engineering: it doesn't have to be that way. We don't accept "that's just how it's done" as an answer, which is why we've built so much of our own internal tooling instead of bolting on something that doesn't quite fit (more on that below). We care about craft, we like each other, and we try to keep it fun.
🏙️ Where we work
Opus is headquartered in NYC (Chinatown). The team is in the office 3-4 days a week, and we run on East Coast hours. Standup is at 10am ET, so this isn't a great fit if you're looking to work West Coast hours. Otherwise, we keep the day-to-day flexible.
About the Role
You'll lead technical initiatives that matter, mentor other engineers, and have a real hand in how our engineering culture develops. Because there's no PM between you and the roadmap, you'll take ambiguous, high-stakes projects from a whiteboard sketch all the way to production, and the decisions you make along the way will shape our customers' experience, our technical foundation, and where we go next.
Unique Challenges
Opus serves tens of thousands of users a month across web and mobile, most of them on their phone, mid-shift, on spotty wifi. Making that experience good is genuinely hard. A few of the problems we're actively solving:
A recommendation engine that reads guest feedback across thousands of locations, spots recurring patterns, and recommends (or auto-drafts) the training that fixes them
An AI content agent that can draft a full training course, objectives, quizzes and all, from a short prompt or a single source doc
Auto-translating product copy and user content into 100+ languages, from buttons to banners. About 30% of the American workforce doesn't speak English as a first language, and Opus lets them switch to their own at any time
A real-time messaging platform built specifically for frontline teams
A queueing system processing millions of jobs a day
Our internal tooling, all named after the Lion King:
Pumbaa formats every open PR so you can see exactly where teammates are blocked on review.
Timon flags you when someone comments on a PR or thread you should know about.
Zazu tells you the moment your code ships to production.
And Rafiki, our AI coding agent, has automated our on-call: it keeps a memory of past incidents, is the first to catch any bug report or question from sales or customer success, and gets its own "20% time" to work on whatever it thinks would improve the business.
What You'll Do
Technical Leadership
Lead complex, ambiguous projects from conception to completion, e.g. our guest-feedback recommendation engine
Anticipate technical issues at the product and architectural level; capturing what a restaurant, a gym, or a delivery fleet needs today in a model that still holds up as we scale
Architect systems, like our queueing system processing millions of jobs a day, that will serve as foundations for years to come
Drive tooling and monitoring initiatives like Zazu and Pumbaa that keep the team moving fast without losing visibility into what's shipping or what's blocked
Make changes to engineering processes that improve quality of life for all engineers. In the spirit of Rafiki's own "20% time," engineers here are trusted to build the thing they think is worth building
Team Development
Mentor other engineers. With just 6 engineers on the team, this isn't a formal program, it's daily pairing and code review.
Collaborate closely with product, design, engineering, and directly with customers on the calls that shape what you build next
Balance speed with quality: we ship about 20 PRs a day, which is only possible because of how much we invest in integration testing and observability
About You
Technical Expertise
Full Stack Excellence: You're comfortable working across our backend (Django, Postgres), web frontend (TypeScript, GraphQL, NextJS), and mobile app (Expo/React-Native) each day
Technical Vision: You can balance solving immediate customer problems while architecting for the future e.g. capturing what a restaurant, a gym, or a delivery fleet needs today in a data model that still holds up as we scale
Systems Thinking: Our queueing system processes millions of jobs a day, and it has to stay reliable whether a customer runs 5 locations or 300. You'll need to design with that range in mind, not just the case in front of you
Quality Focus: We ship about 20 PRs a day to production, some mornings 8-10 of those are written and shipped entirely by AI agents. That's only possible because of how much we invest in integration testing, so we can trust the merge button.
Leadership & Autonomy
Deep Ownership: Each engineer here is responsible for roughly $1M+ in ARR. Ownership is tied to a real number and a real set of customers you know by name
Problem Solver: When something's broken here, "that's just how it's done" isn't an acceptable answer, that's why we've built so much of our own internal tooling instead of accepting workarounds. We want engineers who default to the same instinct.
Initiative: We're currently building an MCP server because customers kept asking for it. Someone had to decide it was worth building. That's the kind of initiative we're looking for.
Communication: There's no PM between you and the roadmap, so a lot of real communication happens in how you write a PR, what you flag in a customer call, what you explain in a Slack thread. We built Pumbaa specifically so a PR's status and blockers are visible to the whole team
Our Technology Stack
Django, Postgres, TypeScript, GraphQL, NextJS, Expo/React Native
Experience with our stack is valuable, but we value engineering fundamentals and adaptability above specific technologies
*Background Check Requirement: As part of our commitment to SOC 2 compliance, all final candidates will be required to successfully complete a background check prior to employment