Senior Staff Software Engineer at Heron Power
Scotts Valley, CA
$200,000–$240,000from the description
Jul 12, 2026
Scotts Valley, CA
Jul 21, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
A senior individual contributor role at a power electronics startup, responsible for setting technical direction and writing production code across backend services, data pipelines, cloud infrastructure, and internal tooling — particularly a platform supporting factory operations and supply chain. The position suits a deeply experienced engineer comfortable owning ambiguous, cross-functional systems end-to-end while also mentoring others and shaping engineering standards.
Staff level · 10+ years · National · Full-time
“or” means any one of them counts — you don't need all of them.
We read this from the posting text with AI. Skim the description below before ruling yourself out.
How this req sits in the market our data
Rare in this occupation — lead with these, and say what you built with them.
Most people in this occupation already list these. Still required — just not what gets you shortlisted.
What the occupation pays Median $138,970 (middle half $107,524–$175,762). This posting is about at that midpoint.
Estimated from BLS employment for this occupation and area, per-skill prevalence across our listing corpus, and published wage benchmarks — as of Jul 28, 2026. It is a model, not a headcount.
Why we read it this way (8)
The job title is 'Senior Staff Software Engineer' — the posting frames this as a Staff+ IC role with org-wide technical direction, which supports a Staff seniority classification. The 'Senior' prefix in the title is treated as an intensifier within the Staff band rather than a separate level.
The Master's degree requirement is listed under 'Must-Have Requirements' but is immediately qualified with 'equivalent demonstrated experience will be considered', so it is not treated as a hard degree gate.
Go, Python, and TypeScript/JavaScript are listed together as interchangeable language options ('one or more modern languages, e.g., …'); Go is used as the primary name with the others as alternatives.
Terraform and Pulumi are listed as interchangeable infrastructure-as-code options; Terraform is the primary with Pulumi as the alternative.
Grafana and Prometheus are both named as observability tools in the same sentence. They are distinct products used together rather than true substitutes, but the JD presents them as a paired example — both are marked required. A note is warranted: they are complementary tools (metrics collection vs. visualization), not interchangeable, despite appearing together.
GitHub Actions is listed under the required section as an example ('e.g., GitHub Actions') for CI/CD pipelines; per schema rules, the 'e.g.' qualifier means the specific tool is interchangeable but the capability is still a hard gate. GitHub Actions is kept as a named required skill; common alternatives (CircleCI, GitLab CI) could substitute.
SQL, relational databases, data pipelines/warehousing, event-driven architectures/message queues, Linux, Git, and SaaS integration experience all appear under the 'Nice-to-Haves' section.
No work location or city is specified in the posting; the CBSA fields are left blank. The role appears US-based given the USD compensation and company context, but no city or remote policy is explicitly stated — remote is set to false as a conservative default since no remote option is mentioned.
Read the full posting
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