Sr Staff Software Engineer

About the job

About SailPoint SailPoint is the global leader in identity security for the cloud enterprise. We empower the world's most influential organizations to securely unlock the power of their workforce and technology. By harnessing the power of advanced AI, machine learning, and cloud-native architecture, SailPoint provides intelligent, automated identity governance that seamlessly secures access to applications, data, and critical infrastructure. Driven by our core values— Innovation, Integrity, Impact, and Individuals —we foster an inclusive, high-trust engineering culture where curiosity and technical excellence thrive. Joining SailPoint means tackling complex distributed systems challenges at global scale while safeguarding millions of user identities worldwide.

Role Overview Are you passionate about building mission-critical enterprise systems and eager to drive real architectural impact? At SailPoint, our Engineering team is where world-class software craftsmanship meets direct customer impact. We are seeking a seasoned Principal or Backend Software Engineer to design, build, and scale reliable, high-throughput microservices and SaaS infrastructure. Our platform is built on a mature, cloud-native, event-driven microservices architecture hosted in AWS, securing identity governance for the world's leading global enterprises. In this role, you will lead complex technical initiatives, mentor senior peers, collaborate across product and UX teams, and deliver robust software that defines the future of identity security.

What You’ll Do (Responsibilities)

- Architect & Build Scalable Services: Design and implement robust, high-performance, and resilient microservices in a modern Java ecosystem, exposing performant REST and event-driven APIs.

- Full Stack & UI Leadership: Collaborate with product and UX designers to build responsive, modern front-end interfaces (React, TypeScript, or modern ES6+ frameworks) and rapid prototypes to validate design decisions.

- System Design & Modeling: Lead domain modeling, object-oriented analysis, and technical design discussions for distributed SaaS applications hosted in AWS.

- Raise the Engineering Bar: Drive engineering excellence through rigorous code reviews, automated testing (unit, integration, and end-to-end), continuous delivery, and comprehensive code coverage metrics.

- Observability & Operational Excellence: Instrument services for performance monitoring, telemetry, tracing, and logging to ensure high availability and proactive issue resolution in production.

- Technical Mentorship & Collaboration: Partner with cross-functional peers—product managers, UX architects, and DevOps engineers—to scope initiatives, estimate complexity, and mentor engineering talent.

What You’ll Bring (Requirements)

- 14+ years of progressive, hands-on professional software development experience building enterprise SaaS or distributed systems.

- Deep Core Java Expertise: Advanced mastery of modern Java (Java 11/17+), concurrency, design patterns, and JVM performance tuning.

- Distributed Systems & Architecture: Proven track record designing and maintaining event-driven microservices and RESTful API ecosystems.

- Full Stack Proficiency: Solid hands-on experience with modern JavaScript/TypeScript frameworks (e.g., React, Angular) and modern front-end build pipelines (ES6+).

- Engineering Rigor: Passion for automated testing (TDD/BDD, JUnit, Mockito, Cypress/Selenium) and CI/CD pipelines.

- Communication & Leadership: Strong verbal and written communication skills with the ability to articulate architectural decisions to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

- Education: Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred Qualifications

- Cloud Native Ecosystems: Direct experience architecting and operating production workloads on AWS (e.g., ECS/EKS, Lambda, SQS, SNS, DynamoDB, S3, RDS).

- Data & AI/ML Systems: Experience integrating with or designing for Big Data pipelines, streaming architectures (Kafka, Kinesis), or AI/ML-driven product features.

- Production Observability: Hands-on experience with metrics and APM tooling (e.g., Datadog, Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, Grafana, CloudWatch).

- Security & Identity Governance: Prior exposure to Identity and Access Management (IAM), OAuth2, OpenID Connect, SAML, or RBAC/ABAC models.

30 / 60 / 90-Day Success Plan This roadmap provides clear expectations and milestones to empower you to ramp up quickly, integrate with the team, and deliver meaningful architectural impact.

First 30 Days: Onboard, Understand & First Ship

- Architecture Immersion: Build a deep understanding of SailPoint’s domain, platform topology, event-driven microservices, data pipelines, and AWS infrastructure.

- Environment & Tooling: Set up local and cloud dev environments, CI/CD pipelines, test automation suites, and observability dashboards.

- Team Alignment: Complete 1:1s with engineering peers, product managers, UX partners, and architects to understand priorities and existing pain points.

- First Production Delivery: Implement, test, and deploy an initial bug fix or small enhancement to production to validate the end-to-end deployment workflow.

Days 31–60: Ownership, Feature Delivery & Design Collaboration

- Take Ownership: Assume technical ownership of a primary microservice component or full-stack feature stream.

- Architectural RFCs: Author and present technical design documents/RFCs for upcoming initiatives, incorporating feedback from security and architecture teams.

- Full Stack Delivery: Collaborate closely with UX and product counterparts to design and deliver intuitive interfaces and supporting backend APIs.

- Quality & Observability: Enhance automated test coverage and set up proactive alerting/telemetry metrics for services under your care.

Days 61–90: Leadership, Scale & Strategic Impact

- Autonomous Execution: Lead end-to-end delivery of high-priority roadmap deliverables, ensuring high throughput, reliability, and zero-downtime releases.

- System Optimization: Identify architectural bottlenecks, technical debt, or scale limits in data persistence/streaming layers and execute performance tuning initiatives.

- Engineering Mentorship: Actively review peer code, lead architectural discussions, and mentor mid-level and senior engineers on design and coding standards.

- Roadmap Contribution: Partner with Product Management to help scope future quarters, translating business vision into scalable engineering milestones.

SailPoint is an equal opportunity employer and we welcome all qualified candidates to apply to join our team.  All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, protected veteran status, or any other category protected by applicable law.

Alternative methods of applying for employment are available to individuals unable to submit an application through this site because of a disability. Contact applicationassistance@sailpoint.com or mail to 11120 Four Points Dr, Suite 100, Austin, TX 78726, to discuss reasonable accommodations.  NOTE: Any unsolicited resumes sent by candidates or agencies to this email will not be considered for current openings at SailPoint.