Staff Software Engineer (Java/Python)

Location: Santa Ana, California, United States. Candidates within a 1-hour commuting distance may be expected to work onsite most of the time. hirify.global uses e-Verify to validate the ability to work legally in the United States.

Company

hirify.global provides technology and value-added services for collectibles, including grading, authentication, vaulting, trading, and research analytics across trading cards, autographs, comic books, coins, video games, event tickets, and memorabilia.

What you will do

• Set the technical direction and own the architecture of the API and collectibles data domain, including Java and Python services, distributed event-driven systems, data stores, and downstream consumers.
• Define API standards for design, versioning, authentication, rate limiting, documentation, developer portals, API gateways, and bot protection.
• Build and evolve data models, ingestion pipelines, quality scoring, database unification, and spec APIs for collectibles across PSA, Beckett, and SGC.
• Establish standards for testing, observability, performance, incident response, and operational reliability.
• Lead multi-quarter projects, coordinate engineers and stakeholders across Product, Marketplace, Grading, Vault, Data, and platform teams, and manage cross-system dependencies.
• Mentor engineers and establish guardrails, workflows, and verification practices for AI coding tools and agents.

Requirements

• 8+ years of engineering experience, including technical leadership of multi-engineer, multi-quarter projects and a record of designing, shipping, and scaling products with measurable business impact.
• Expert-level Java and Python backend engineering, including Spring Boot, complex API surfaces, asynchronous patterns, and data consistency in distributed systems.
• Experience designing and operating REST APIs at scale and, where relevant, GraphQL or gRPC APIs, including versioning, backward compatibility, authentication, and developer experience.
• Deep relational and NoSQL database and data-modeling expertise, including PostgreSQL or comparable systems, DynamoDB or comparable systems, schema design, migrations, query performance, shared-database coupling, ingestion, and enrichment pipelines.
• Strong distributed-systems fundamentals, including service boundaries, contract design, Kafka-based event-driven architectures, messaging, idempotency, and failure handling in production.
• Production AWS and Kubernetes experience with infrastructure-as-code fluency in CDK and/or Terraform.
• Enough hands-on experience with modern frontend frameworks such as React to design and review across application layers.
• Experience raising engineering standards for testing, observability, documentation, and incident response, including Datadog or similar tools, dashboards, alerting, and distributed tracing.
• Daily fluency with AI coding assistants and agentic tools such as Claude Code, Copilot, or Cursor, including integration into CI, code review, and documentation workflows and mature judgment about verification, security, intellectual property, and limitations.
• Familiarity with Agile/Scrum, strong written and verbal communication, analytical and troubleshooting ability, cross-functional influence, and an ownership mindset.

Nice to have

• Experience with API gateways such as Kong.
• Passion for collecting.

Culture & Benefits

• Work with products serving hirify.global and partners across millions of collectible specifications and certificates.
• Collaborative work across Product, Marketplace, Grading, Vault, Data, platform, and business teams.
• Video interviews require cameras on; some interview steps may take place by phone.
• Remote roles may include an onsite interview at the final stages at the company's discretion.
• Accommodation is available for occasional circumstances during the hiring process.

Hiring process

• Interview steps may be conducted by video or phone, with cameras required during video interviews.
• For remote roles, an onsite interview may be requested during the final stages.