Staff Software Engineer
REI · Seattle, WA
$130,200–$208,200from the description
Jul 16, 2026
Seattle, WA
Jul 21, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
A technical lead role on the team responsible for REI's customer and marketing platform infrastructure, covering areas such as identity and consent management, customer data, offer and promotional services, and personalization integrations. The position involves guiding engineering execution, setting code quality standards, mentoring engineers, and owning the operational health of these platforms. It suits an experienced backend engineer comfortable leading teams building distributed, cloud-native services at scale.
Staff level · 6+ years · Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA · 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
Roughly 470 people in the Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA area plausibly meet what this posting asks for (software developers). range 200–700
Applicant volume Moderate — A normal amount of company. The rare requirements below are what will separate a shortlisted application from the rest.
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 $170,959 (middle half $135,720–$216,519). 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 (7)
The role is titled 'Staff Software Engineer (Dev Lead)' and carries genuine cross-team technical leadership scope (owning platform health, setting engineering standards, mentoring, shaping architecture across multiple Customer & Marketing domains), which supports the Staff band despite the 6+ year minimum — that floor is lower than typical for Staff, but the described scope is clearly above Senior.
The alt SOC 11-3021 (Computer and Information Systems Managers) is a plausible runner-up: the role includes mentoring, sprint planning, and stakeholder management, but the JD emphasizes hands-on technical delivery, code reviews, and architecture — primary work is IC-style engineering leadership rather than people management.
Jenkins and GitLab CI are listed as examples under the required CI/CD section ('tools such as GitLab, Jenkins, or similar'); they are hard-gated on CI/CD capability, with the specific tool being interchangeable — alternatives reflect this.
Datadog, Splunk, and New Relic are listed as examples under the required observability section ('such as Datadog, Splunk, New Relic, or similar'); same treatment applied.
Auth0 and Customer Data Platform appear in the strategic-initiatives narrative ('Contribute to strategic initiatives supporting… Auth0, Consent Management…') rather than in a formal requirements block, so they are marked preferred.
REI's headquarters is in Kent, WA (Seattle metro). The posting does not specify remote eligibility; remote is set to false.
The JD lists 'APIs' as a required technology alongside Java and Spring Boot; this is captured as REST (the dominant API style in the described microservices context) rather than a vague generic.
Read the full posting
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