{"id":1356651,"url":"https://alion.io/job/wme-staff-software-engineer","title":"Staff Software Engineer","company":{"id":1780327,"name":"WME","domain":"wmeagency.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/wmeagency","size_band":"1001-5000","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Workday","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":75,"open_postings":4,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":1,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":36,"computed_at":"2026-10-01T05:45:00Z"}},"role":"Backend","role_family":"Backend","seniority":"staff","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"remote","remote_scope":"stated_countries","remote_scope_basis":"board_field","remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":["US"],"hiring_countries_total":1,"salary":{"min":176250,"max":null,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":176250},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":15,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Azure","optional":false},{"name":"Azure DevOps","optional":false},{"name":"CI/CD","optional":false},{"name":"Docker","optional":false},{"name":"GitHub Actions","optional":false},{"name":"gRPC","optional":false},{"name":"Kubernetes","optional":false},{"name":"Next.js","optional":false},{"name":"Node JS","optional":false},{"name":"PostgreSQL","optional":false},{"name":"React.js","optional":false},{"name":"Rest API","optional":false},{"name":"Terraform","optional":false},{"name":"TypeScript","optional":false},{"name":"JavaScript","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-09-02T00:00:00Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-09-02","last_verified_at":"2026-10-01T04:11:14Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":29,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":29},"description":"WME is building the next generation of internal platforms that power one of the world's leading entertainment companies. The software we build helps agents and teams manage relationships, deals, and opportunities across the global entertainment industry.\nWe're looking for a Staff Software Engineer to take ownership of a major area of our platform. This is a senior ownership role rather than a senior individual contributor role. You'll be accountable for whether your area is staffed well, moving at the speed the business needs, aligned with product, and making deliberate architectural choices. You'll be working through the team leads who run day-to-day execution rather than driving that execution yourself.\nDeep technical judgment still matters here. You can't set a technical bar you couldn't personally meet, and you'll make the calls that shape how these systems evolve. But the work happens a level up from the ticket queue, and the engineers who thrive in this role are the ones who find that shift energizing rather than limiting.\nWe're building this engineering organization largely from the ground up, so we're looking for people who enjoy scrappy environments, are comfortable navigating ambiguity, and want to help shape how a team operates. We're also investing heavily in AI-assisted development, and engineers here actively use modern AI tools and workflows to improve development velocity and product quality. We take the work seriously, but not ourselves.\nWhat You'll Do\nOwn an area of the platform. You'll be responsible for the outcomes of one or more teams working across a connected set of product surfaces. Scope is assigned based on business need and shifts as the org grows.\nKeep leadership ahead of risk. Your manager should hear about slippage, resourcing gaps, or a bad bet before they have to ask. That includes pushing back if a timeline isn't realistic, or a product ask will create debt worth knowing about. Raising risk early is never treated as a failure here.\nGive your teams context. Engineers in your area should understand why a priority exists, why a tradeoff was made, and why something changed. You're the connection between company direction and day-to-day execution.\nOwn technical health. Staffing mix, delivery pace, product alignment, and architectural direction all sit with you. A team can be fully staffed and shipping quickly while quietly accumulating problems, so tracking velocity isn't the same as setting the technical bar - you're responsible for both.\nOwn the roadmap. You should be able to articulate what your area is building over the next quarter and defend the sequencing on your own.\nGrow leads. Identifying and developing engineers who can own execution is a core part of the job, not a side effect of it.\nHire. You'll source and interview for your own teams and weigh in on candidates joining them.\nPartner with a technical program manager. You'll work alongside a TPM who runs planning cadence, cross-team dependencies, and operational execution. You set the direction and make the calls; they keep the machinery of delivery running, so you're not absorbed into it.\nMake architectural calls. Including the uncomfortable ones. You decide where to take on debt and where to pay it down, rather than letting either drift by default.\nShape architecture beyond your own area. You'll work with engineering leadership and peer Staff Engineers on overall system architecture and the shared components that cut across products.\nExample Problems You Might Own\nDesigning systems that capture and connect relationships across the entertainment industry\nBuilding modern CRM workflows that replace fragmented legacy tools and spreadsheets\nDeveloping AI-powered features that surface insights from operational data\nCreating APIs and services that support complex deal and workflow management\nMigrating legacy applications into modern web-based systems\nWhat We're Looking For\nOwnership and judgment\nExperience owning outcomes across multiple teams or workstreams at once, through leads rather than direct execution\nA track record of surfacing risk early and pushing back constructively on unrealistic scope or timelines\nExperience growing engineers into technical leadership\nComfort owning a roadmap and defending its prioritization\nHiring and interviewing experience\nComfort working where systems, processes, and org structure are still forming\nTechnical depth\nExtensive software engineering experience, typically 15+ years\nStrong full-stack background building modern web applications, with deep proficiency in React, TypeScript, and Next.js\nSolid backend experience with Node.js, building scalable services and APIs (REST and gRPC)\nExperience designing and managing relational databases, particularly PostgreSQL\nExperience with cloud infrastructure; Azure preferred, including cloud-native services such as serverless functions, managed databases, queues, and blob storage\nContainerized workloads with Docker and Kubernetes, and infrastructure as code with Terraform\nFamiliarity with CI/CD pipelines and developer tooling (GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps, or similar)\nStrong product instincts and a collaborative mindset\nHow We Build\nShip practical software that solves real problems\nFavor simple, maintainable architectures\nWork closely across engineering, product, and design\nUse modern cloud infrastructure (Azure), Terraform, and containerized deployments\nMaintain automated CI/CD pipelines to keep shipping fast and safe\nLeverage AI-assisted development across the engineering workflow\nAI-First Engineering\nAI tools are part of our everyday engineering workflow. We encourage engineers to use modern AI-assisted development tools to accelerate coding, testing, debugging, and system design, and we're actively exploring how AI can enhance the systems we build.\nPer local requirements and in the interest of transparency, the rate shown below reflects the prevalent current hiring range for this position. Hiring pay rates are based on a number of factors, including location and may vary depending on job-related qualifications, knowledge, skills and experience. The company strives to provide locally competitive rewards packages, which include base rate along with, as applicable, short- and long-term incentives, growth and developmental opportunities, and robust benefits, such as health care, retirement, vacation and other paid time off, and additional offerings.\nHiring Rate Minimum:\n$176,250 annually (minimum will not fall below the applicable state/local minimum salary thresholds)Hiring Rate Maximum:\n$235,000 annuallyWME is an equal opportunity employer and encourages applications from qualified and eligible candidates regardless of sex, race, disability, age, sexual orientation, or religion or belief.","description_format":"text","description_chars":6776,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":15,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":[],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"United States","iso":"US","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Media & Entertainment","Content Creation","Digital Media"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-27T22:39:24Z"}],"liveness":{"score":49,"band":"ok","label":"Likely open","p_open":1,"p_active":0.65,"p_room":0.75,"age_days":29,"expected_fill_days":36,"reasons":["conf:1","velocity","win:late"],"computed_at":"2026-10-01T05:45:00Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":176250,"is_top_pay":false},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/wme-staff-software-engineer","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/wme-staff-software-engineer.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-01T17:48:40Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","usage":{"tier":"crawler","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":26,"day_limit":5000,"remaining_today":4974,"minute_limit":60,"resets_at":"2026-10-02T00:00:00Z"}}}