About Wing:
Wing offers drone delivery as a safe, fast, and sustainable solution for last mile logistics. Consumer appetites for on-demand services are increasing, but current delivery methods are inefficient, costly, and contribute to road accidents and air pollution. Wing’s fleet of highly automated delivery drones can transport small packages directly from businesses to homes on-demand, in minutes. We design, build, and operate our aircraft, and offer drone delivery services on two continents. Our technology is designed to be easy to integrate into existing delivery and logistics networks, offering a scalable drone delivery solution for a broad range of businesses. Wing is a part of Google's parent company, Alphabet, and our mission is to create the preferred means of delivery for the planet. If you're ready to do the greatest work of your life, come join us.
About the Role:
Wing is looking for a Senior Staff Software Engineer to join our Ground Systems team. This role will be based in our Palo Alto office (hybrid).
This is a unique, high-impact role for a senior technical software architect who operates as lead technical architect for the Ground Systems organization, acting as a force multiplier for its ~60-person engineering team. As the gateway to Wing's autonomous delivery network, the Ground Systems team builds the platform that connects our delivery service to the world, powering the solutions for our Customers, Partners, Regulators, Pilots, and Operations. This includes our Wing Delivery application, our partner integrations, our industry solutions to accessing and sharing airspace and our fleet management and network observability systems. Our engineers are developing a highly automated, reliable, and innovative last-mile delivery network, and we are seeking an expert to help us design, build and scale it.
This position is for a key technical leader and mentor who thrives on earning the trust of teams to solve complex, systemic problems that others may not see. You will leverage your deep expertise in areas like software architecture, production reliability, large-scale data analysis, and distributed systems to find and address unseen risks and opportunities for improvement.
The scope requires that you build on success within Ground Systems to champion best practices and influence the wider Wing engineering organization., both process and technical, across Wing. You need to know how and when to instill the right level of rigor into our systems, policies and practices at the right times. This role requires someone who is intrinsically driven to teach, mentor, and grow the engineering organization's capabilities, ultimately helping us build the future of delivery.
What You’ll Do:
Integrate deeply with the Ground Systems teams by rolling up your sleeves to help debug complex issues, participate in Software architecture discussions, review design documents, and understand our production systems firsthand. You will earn the trust and respect of the organization to effectively lead and influence change from within.
- Drive strategic initiatives for Ground System and influence standards and processes across Wing’s technology organization to increase the reliability, quality, and efficiency of the Wing delivery network, ensuring our software architecture can scale with the business.
Analyze and review system designs, architecture, production systems, and team practices to uncover systemic issues and opportunities for improvement across Wing’s Ground Systems software.
- Synthesize these findings into a clear vision, creating and owning foundational Ground Systems Software Engineering Principles in addition to a strategic roadmap for increasing reliability, and observability.
- Educate and upskill our software engineers by establishing a curriculum and processes, developing new training materials, and personally mentoring engineers on software design and production excellence.
- Lead our post-incident reviews, acting as a key escalation point for major outages and driving the decisions and follow-through that prevent future failures.
- Advocate for the engineering organization by using your data-driven insights and hands-on findings to influence technical direction and investment at the leadership level.
- Champion a collaborative engineering culture where learning from one another is paramount, mentoring software engineering leaders and fostering an environment of continuous improvement.
- Represent Wing’s technical excellence both internally and externally through involvement in recruiting, industry outreach, conference presentations and standards organizations.
What You’ll Need:
- 15+ years of professional experience, including significant work in Software Engineering, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), and building large-scale distributed systems.
- Expertise in designing, analyzing, and troubleshooting complex, large-scale distributed systems.
- A deep and practical understanding of modern reliability principles, including incident management, post-mortem culture, SLO/SLI development.
- Demonstrated ability to drive strategic technical decisions across large teams
- Proven experience as an educator and mentor, with a passion for teaching and developing processes and technical curriculum for other engineers.
- High emotional intelligence and empathy to earn the trust of engineering teams
- Mature data analysis skills to make informed decisions on technical strategy and investment.
- Exceptional communication and influencing skills, with the ability to earn trust and work horizontally across a large engineering organization to drive change.
The US base salary range for this full-time position is the salary range below + bonus + equity + benefits. Wing’s salary ranges are determined by role, level, and location. Your recruiter can share more about the specific salary range for your location during the hiring process.
Wing is an equal opportunity employer and it is Wing's policy to comply with all applicable national, state and local laws pertaining to nondiscrimination and equal opportunity. Employment at Wing is based solely on a person's merit and qualifications directly related to professional competence. Wing does not discriminate against any employee or applicant because of race, creed, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity/expression, national origin, disability, age, genetic information, veteran status, marital status, pregnancy or related condition (including breastfeeding), or any other basis protected by law.
If you have a need that requires accommodation during the interview process due to a disability or special need, please let us know by completing our Candidate Accommodations Request Form.
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