Staff Software Engineer, Data at Bayer
Chicago, IL
$117,000–$171,000from the description
Jul 5, 2026
Chicago, IL
Jul 21, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
A staff-level backend engineering role focused on designing and operating large-scale data platforms for precision agriculture, including geospatial imagery and AI/ML pipelines. Day-to-day work spans architecting distributed systems on AWS and/or GCP, building event-driven and streaming architectures, and setting technical standards across teams. The role also carries a significant mentorship responsibility, guiding senior engineers toward staff-level leadership. Suits an experienced engineer with deep distributed systems and data platform expertise.
Staff level · 8+ years · Remote · 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 11,000 people nationally plausibly meet what this posting asks for (software developers). range 6,600–16,500
Applicant volume Moderate — A normal amount of company. The rare requirements below are what will separate a shortlisted application from the rest.
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 role lists multiple US locations (Creve Coeur MO, Chicago IL, Seattle WA) plus a residence-based/remote option; the CBSA is set to St. Louis (Creve Coeur) as the primary listed location, but this role is effectively open to remote US candidates.
The SOC is Medium confidence: the role is primarily a backend/distributed-systems software engineering role (15-1252), but its heavy emphasis on data platform architecture and pipelines gives it meaningful overlap with Data Architects (15-1243).
BS degree is listed as required but the JD immediately qualifies it with 'or equivalent combination of education and experience', so the degree requirement is set to None.
Docker appears in both the Required and Preferred sections; it is treated as required based on its explicit placement in the Required block.
Event-driven messaging (SQS/JMS etc.) is listed as a hard requirement; Kafka/Kinesis/Pub/Sub appear in the responsibilities narrative and are captured as preferred.
Geospatial data experience and ML/AI platform experience (feature stores, training/inference pipelines) are listed under Preferred as 'Strong Plus' items.
The advertised Staff seniority is supported by the actual requirements: org-wide technical direction, mentoring senior engineers to Staff level, and cross-team systemic problem ownership all align with a genuine Staff-level scope.
This posting reads as a fully-remote role, so it was scored against the national candidate pool rather than a single metro.
Read the full posting
The employer publishes the full description on their own site — read it there ↗. Or sign in to read it here — it's free, and it also lets you track this application.