Staff Software Engineer

The posting, as Babylist wrote it

What The Role Is

As a Staff Engineer at Babylist, you own some of our hardest domains and decide where they go. Millions of families depend on what we build. Agents write most of the code now. So the hard part is yours: what to build, how it should work and whether what shipped was right. You're still in the code for the genuinely hard problems. Agents handle the volume. You spend your time on the parts that need a person. We're building well beyond the registry now: the financial side of raising a kid, maternal health made simpler and more human, the education new parents are looking for and the community around them. The hard problems run across all of it, plus the platform underneath and the AI we already ship to families.

You'll own a big piece of the product, but you won't be boxed into it. The roadmap is open. You have a say in which bets we make, and you pick what you take on next.

What You'll Own

A Staff Engineer here sets direction. You own a domain: a product surface, a platform area or a capability that cuts across several teams. You set where it's going over the next year or two, sequence the bets that get there and make the technical and product calls along the way. You're still in the code. We don't have architects who've stopped building. If you stepped away, multiple teams would feel it. Your influence shows up in the systems and the work other teams choose to build on. You don't need direct reports to have that reach. It comes from what you build.

In practice, you

• Take a fuzzy business problem from the first sketch through to production, and stay on the hook for whether it actually helped customers.
• Build the platform or tooling other teams adopt by choice, and own it as it scales.
• Make the architecture calls that span teams and the ones that are expensive to reverse.
• Set the standard for how your domain builds with AI. Decide what good looks like, build the patterns and evals that get agents there and catch the output that's confidently wrong before it ships.
• Partner with product, design and data as a peer, shaping what's worth building from the start.
• Coach Senior engineers through the hard calls, the ambiguous ones as much as the technical ones.

A few problems people at this level are working on right now:

• Resolving one customer across registry, shop and health, plus the friends and family buying for them, so personalization works everywhere without each team rebuilding it.
• Designing the knowledge system our coding agents reliably load, and working out how much context actually helps before it starts to hurt.
• Building Early Investor, our new family finance product, from scratch, on a deadline that can't move.

Who You Are

You've shipped production systems for enough years to have earned strong opinions, and you hold them loosely. You can pick up an ambiguous problem and start moving before anyone hands you the full picture. You've already changed how a team builds with AI, and the new wa
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nada, and we have been for years. That's not changing. We trust you to own your time and your outcomes, and we get everyone in a room together twice a year. Teams are small, pods of three to five engineers, so nothing you ship disappears into a committee. You'll work shoulder to shoulder with product, design and data, and with the partners across the business who rely on what you ship. You'll also stay close to customers yourself: sitting in on user interviews, watching session recordings, riding along with support. Here that's part of the engineering job, on a regular basis.

How We Hire

Three rounds, usually two to three weeks start to finish.

• Recruiter conversation (30 minutes). Trade context: what you want next, what we're building and straight answers on comp, team and remote.
• Technical screen (1 hour). One round, no AI, language-agnostic. Reach for Google when you normally would. We just want to see how you reason from first principles.
• Final round (4 hours). Four one-hour interviews: system design, AI-assisted coding with the tools you'd actually use here, product sense and culture and values. You'll hear back either way within 24 to 48 hours.

If your timeline is tight, tell us and we'll move faster.

Benefits

• Company-paid medical and fully covered dental and vision
• A RRSP match
• Generous paid parental leave for birthing and non-birthing parents, plus a gradual return-to-work program
• Winter Wonder Week, a paid company-wide week off at the end of the year
• A remote-work stipend
• Mental-health and wellness support

A Few Things To Know

• We record and transcribe interviews to evaluate candidates, in line with applicable privacy laws.
• We expect you to use AI in your work and we welcome it in the process, but what you submit and say should reflect your own thinking.
• If you have a family member or close relationship with a Babylist employee, let your recruiter know.
• Official outreach only ever comes from an @babylist.com address