Position Summary
This is a senior individual contributor and the primary technical authority on the integrations that connect MeridianLink’s products to one another and to the external systems our clients depend on. This role sits within Platform Services and owns integration architecture, API design, and the patterns and standards that engineering teams in adjacent product lines build against. The right person combines deep technical expertise in integration and API systems with the maturity to operate across teams and drive architectural decisions.
Key Competencies
Staff engineers operate across multiple teams or an entire product line. They set technical direction, make architecture and technology decisions that others build against, and raise the engineering floor across the teams they touch. Staff engineers at MeridianLink are active, daily users of AI-assisted development tools, and go further by building the workflows, tooling, and patterns that make those tools more effective for the teams around them.
Technical Leadership & Architecture
- Makes critical architecture and design decisions that span multiple teams or an entire product area
- Evaluates technology choices with a clear view of trade-offs at scale, not just for the immediate problem
- Drives technical standards and patterns that other engineers can follow without being supervised
- Identifies systemic problems before they become incidents
- Reasons fluently across the fundamentals of distributed systems: how systems handle load, how they store large datasets, and how they stay correct under failure
- Treats every architecture decision as a trade-off between speed, cost, and correctness, and makes that trade-off explicit when guiding teams; sizes systems with back-of-the-envelope estimation and decides microservices versus monolith on evidence rather than default
Cross-Team Execution
- Provides day-to-day technical direction for one or more scrum teams without holding a management title
- Steps into ambiguous, high-stakes technical problems across teams and drives them to resolution, without being asked
- Holds a high bar in code and design review across team boundaries
Integration Architecture & API Design
- Defines integration patterns, API contracts, and data exchange standards used across product lines
- Evaluates build-vs-buy decisions for integration infrastructure, including API gateways, event streaming, and messaging platforms
- Designs resilient, observable integration systems that degrade gracefully and recover predictably
- Drives adoption of shared integration infrastructure and establishes standards for how teams onboard to it
Ecosystem & Product Knowledge
- Develops deep working knowledge of MeridianLink’s product ecosystem, including the data flows, dependencies, and integration points
- Anticipates how product-level changes cascade across integration surfaces and flags risk before it ships
- Builds relationships with product and engineering stakeholders across adjacent teams to stay ahead of integration needs
Expected Duties
Architectural Leadership
- Own the reference architecture for the Platform Integrations layer, covering API standards, event-driven patterns, shared integration service design, and third-party integration frameworks
- Lead technical due diligence and design reviews for new integration requirements, particularly those that cross product lines or involve external partners
- Define and document API contracts, integration patterns, and onboarding standards that enable product teams to build on shared integration infrastructure with confidence
- Drive decisions on integration tooling, frameworks, and platforms in partnership with the Platform Foundation and Capabilities teams
Hands-On Delivery
- Contribute directly to implementation of integration services, APIs, and shared libraries used across the engineering organization
- Participate in code review and design review with a high bar, raising quality across the team
- Build and maintain tooling that makes integration development faster and more reliable for other engineers
- Validate and improve AI-assisted development practices within the integrations domain
Platform Standards & Governance
- Author RFCs and ADRs that document integration design decisions with enough clarity and context to remain useful for years
- Establish and maintain a shared integration knowledge base, including runbooks, onboarding guides, and API documentation
- Participate in architecture review for integration-adjacent work happening in product and platform teams, catching design issues before implementation begins
- Contribute to platform governance processes to ensure integration decisions are made through the right channels
Collaboration & Growing Others
- Develop Senior engineers toward Staff-level scope; give them problems and opportunities that stretch them, not just guidance on their current work
- Partner with Engineering Managers and Product leadership to align technical decisions with delivery goals
- Own the design and maintenance of technical knowledge infrastructure, including RFCs, ADRs, runbooks, and onboarding paths, so teams can operate without needing to escalate
Qualifications: Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities
Required
- 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with demonstrated technical leadership across multiple teams or product areas
- Proven ability to make and defend architecture decisions at scale
- Active daily use of AI-assisted development tools
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or equivalent experience
- Demonstrated experience designing and building production-grade integration systems: RESTful APIs, event-driven architectures, or enterprise messaging patterns
- Experience with API gateway technologies and API lifecycle management, including versioning, contracts, and deprecation
- Strong proficiency in at least one backend language used in integration and platform contexts (Java, Python, C#, or similar)
- Experience deploying and operating integration workloads on cloud platforms, AWS strongly preferred
- Familiarity with event streaming platforms and asynchronous processing patterns
Preferred
- Experience with enterprise integration patterns and frameworks at scale across multiple engineering teams
- Prior work in a multi-product fintech or financial services environment where integration complexity spans regulatory boundaries
- Experience with API management platforms and governance tooling
- Experience establishing integration standards or governance processes across multiple engineering teams
What Success Looks Like
A successful hire quickly becomes the integration team’s architectural anchor, reducing the number of design decisions that need to escalate while simultaneously raising the quality of the decisions that happen at the team level. Over time, impact is measured in the durability of the integration standards they establish, the engineering hours saved by the tooling and documentation they produce, and the degree to which product teams across the organization trust the integration platform as a reliable foundation.
