Staff Software Engineer, Luxury | Lyft | San Francisco

Lyft’s Luxury team builds rich, creative features that set the standard for the ride sharing industry, including app experiences, UIs, and infrastructure for Black, Black SUV, and other upmarket modes where quality is uncompromising. As a Staff Software Engineer, you will be a critical technical leader across backend, frontend, iOS, and Android, owning complex systems, defining strategic roadmaps, and driving cross-functional alignment and engineering excellence. You will collaborate with engineering, product, data science, analytics, and operations to iterate quickly and delight passengers and drivers. Ownership is key: you should track a project to successful completion and beyond.

Key Responsibilities

• Shape the long-term architecture of full-stack systems, taking accountability for both short-term functionality and long-term health
• Translate business goals into engineering projects, and own the technical roadmap from conception to delivery, managing cross-team dependencies and risks
• Champion improvements in observability, performance, and tech debt reduction, extending your influence beyond your immediate team
• Establish best practices for deployment, alerting, and on-call health, and own platform stability by finding root causes and building preventive safeguards
• Drive alignment across product, design, and operations, resolve bottlenecks, and make decisive trade-offs to protect system architecture from competing priorities
• Mentor and level up the engineers around you by delegating stretch opportunities, leading cross-team reviews, and fostering technical excellence
• Serve as a dependable, high-bar interviewer and an active member of Lyft’s internal engineering community

Requirements

• 8+ years of software engineering industry experience, with a proven record of technical leadership and system ownership
• Experience developing mobile apps, and the ability to guide client-server and iOS/Android decisions
• Deep expertise designing, debugging, and running fault-tolerant, highly available, large-scale distributed systems
• Demonstrated experience driving technical roadmaps, managing cross-team dependencies, and influencing system architecture at an organizational level
• Solid knowledge of distributed systems, relational databases, and NoSQL databases
• Experience with public cloud platforms (e.g., AWS, GCP, Microsoft Azure) and container orchestration technologies (e.g., Kubernetes, Docker, cri-o)
• Ability to explain complex technical trade-offs to technical and non-technical stakeholders

Skills

Technical Skills

• Backend, frontend, iOS, and Android development
• Distributed systems, relational databases, and NoSQL databases
• AWS, GCP, or Azure
• Kubernetes, Docker, and container orchestration
• Observability, deployment, and on-call practices

Soft Skills

• Technical leadership and ownership
• Cross-functional alignment
• Mentoring
• Communicating trade-offs to varied audiences

Benefits

• Medical, dental, and vision insurance options, with additional programs available when enrolled
• Mental health benefits
• Family building benefits
• Child care and pet benefits
• 401(k) plan with company match
• 12 observed holidays, plus discretionary paid time off for salaried team members (15 days for hourly team members)
• 18 weeks of paid parental leave for biological, adoptive, and foster parents
• Subsidized commuter benefits
• Monthly Lyft credits and a complimentary Lyft Pink membership