Staff Software Engineer II
First seen by Alion on Aug 29, 2026.
About the job :
Make Your Mark :
We're looking for an accomplished, deeply hands-on Staff II Software Engineer with 15+ years of software engineering experience and a focused track record in Agentic AI, Generative AI systems, and large-scale software engineering.
This is a senior individual contributor role that combines architectural leadership with direct execution - you will drive design and delivery while simultaneously guiding and unblocking a team of Staff Engineers and Technical Leads.
The role demands both breadth and depth across the stack.
You will architect scalable systems, build and orchestrate intelligent agents, and establish the engineering standards that make those agents enterprise-ready for a secure, compliant financial platform.
If you have a passion for delivering products that make a difference, are driven to make things better in all that you do and are eager to work in a collaborative agile environment where developers are dedicated to solving customer problems and innovating, we would love to talk to you.
You'll Get To :
Architecture & Platform Ownership :
- Own end-to-end architecture, build highly extensible & modular applications.
- Drive the long-term evolution of Blackline's platform.
- Architect the agentic AI system end to end agent registry, policy engine, metrics ingestion pipeline, anomaly detection, and human-in-the-loop (HITL) orchestration.
Hands-on Execution :
- Stay deeply hands-on : when Staff Engineers or Tech Leads are stuck on system design, integration challenges, or production issues, step in directly with code, design sketches, or paired debugging sessions.
- This is not a review-only role.
- Fine-tune, prompt-engineer, and evaluate foundation models (Gemini, GPT, Claude) for accounting-domain tasks such as variance explanation.
Technical Leadership & People Development :
- Run architecture working sessions, design clinics, and 1:1 coaching with Staff Engineers and Technical Leads to build their depth in agent governance and FinTech compliance patterns.
- Set architecture direction and raise the engineering bar across the team through design reviews and hands-on mentorship.
Cross-functional Influence :
- Align architecture decisions across Engineering, Security, Compliance, and Data Platform teams, and represent the AI Platform in cross-functional technical forums.
- Present technical proposals, architecture trade-offs, and risk assessments to senior leadership and key stakeholders.
Reliability, Observability & Release :
- Establish first-class observability across the product platform: structured logging, distributed tracing, metrics, and dashboards.
- Own the release strategy for the platform : CI/CD pipelines, progressive delivery (feature flags, canary, blue green), automated quality gates, and safe rollback paths for agent and model deployments.
- Drive production readiness and operational excellence: runbooks, incident response, on-call practices, and post-incident reviews that reduce MTTR and harden the platform over time.
What You'll Bring :
- Bachelor's or master's degree in computer science or a related field.
- 15+ years of software engineering experience with broad distributed-systems depth across enterprise platforms.
- A proven track record of guiding and unblocking Staff Engineers and Technical Leads : setting architecture direction, reviewing designs, and stepping in hands-on when needed.
- Demonstrated experience architecting and deploying complex, production-grade systems at scale, ideally in regulated industries (FinTech, Financial Services, or Healthcare).
- Hands-on expertise with .NET, C#, Python, SQL Server, and Snowflake.
- Comfort operating at 90%+ hands-on design and implementation.
- This is a Senior Staff individual contributor role with technical leadership responsibilities, not a management role.
- Passion for engineering excellence, intellectual curiosity, and a demonstrated ability for continuous learning.
- Proficiency leveraging AI-powered coding assistants (e.g., Claude, Cursor) to accelerate development, generate optimized code, and troubleshoot complex challenges.
- Strong grounding in observability and production monitoring: metrics, logging, distributed tracing, and dashboarding.
Were Even More Excited If You Have :
- FinTech or Financial Services domain background.
- Experience with Google Vertex AI Agent Builder or similar managed agent platforms.
- Working knowledge of Python.
- Experience with building, orchestrating, or governing AI agents and/or GenAI systems including prompt engineering, model evaluation, and safety/guardrail patterns.
- Familiarity with DORA metrics and data-driven delivery improvement, and experience instrumenting release/deployment pipelines for measurable impact.
Thrive At BlackLine Because You Are Joining :
- A technology-based company with a sense of adventure and a vision for the future.
- Every door at BlackLine is open.
- Just bring your brains, your problem-solving skills, and be part of a winning team at the world's most trusted name in Finance Automation!
- A culture that is kind, open, and accepting.
- It's a place where people can embrace what makes them unique, and the mix of cultural backgrounds and varying interests cultivates diverse thought and perspectives.
- A culture where BlackLiner's continued growth and learning is empowered.
- BlackLine offers a wide variety of professional development seminars and inclusive affinity groups to celebrate and support our diversity.
Skills
Distributed Systems, .Net, C#, SQL Server, Python, System Design, Generative AI