Staff Software Engineer, Workflows Platform

• Jump on a Rocketship: Since launching out of stealth mode just over 2 years ago, our team has grown from 20 to ~100 people and our customer base has 10x’ed with companies like GitHub, MongoDB and Major League Baseball!
• Build with Renowned Investor Backing: Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) backed us since the beginning and we've raised over $65m from Scale, Neo, Greg Brockman (President at OpenAI), Phil Venables (CISO at Google), and others.
• Thrive in a Unique Culture: You’ll join an early-stage company where you have actual influence on the trajectory of the company. We deeply care about our people and the philosophy we live by - check out our values here.

We’re looking for a Staff Software Engineer to lead the design and implementation of our next-generation Workflows & Notifications Platform. In this role, you’ll build the critical infrastructure that enables real-time, context-aware messaging and task orchestration across our Identity Governance product—from access reviews and approval flows to Slack alerts and audit trail notifications.

You’ll work cross-functionally with product, design, and infrastructure teams to define robust, extensible APIs, establish messaging contracts, and evolve a developer-friendly platform that powers seamless user communication and governance automation.

We’re a startup that values ownership, curiosity, and trust—and we’re looking for engineers who love building infrastructure that enables teams to move faster while improving resilience and visibility.

✨ Your Responsibilities

• Lead the development and enhancement of Lumos’s event-driven notifications and workflow orchestration systems, ensuring they are scalable, extensible, and reliable across core identity governance features like access reviews and JIT approvals.
• Own and evolve the core architecture for multi-channel messaging, including delivery routing, retry strategies, escalation paths, and message templating with support for localization and personalization.
• Partner with product and engineering teams to design developer-friendly APIs and contracts for triggering, previewing, and managing user-facing messages and workflow states.
• Implement infrastructure and tooling to support observability, auditing, and delivery guarantees, enabling teams to confidently build on top of the messaging and workflow layers.
• Collaborate with platform and infra teams to ensure seamless integration with identity workflows, system events, and service boundaries—prioritizing fault tolerance, idempotency, and high throughput.
• Build and maintain internal tooling, CLIs, and reusable abstractions that empower other engineers to quickly compose, test, and deploy communication workflows without deep platform knowledge.
• Drive systemic improvements in workflow lifecycle management, including support for delayed tasks, time-based escalations, approval state machines, and SLA-bound execution paths.

🙌 What We Value

We’re looking for engineers who lead with systems thinking and curiosity—who ask “what needs to happen when?” and build with the confidence that comes from modeling complex flows and edge cases. You’ll thrive here if you enjoy designing clean abstractions, collaborating across teams, and creating tools that make communication and orchestration feel effortless.

• 5+ years of experience as a backend or platform engineer, with direct experience building event-driven systems, workflow orchestration, or notifications infrastructure.
• Deep knowledge of asynchronous architectures, including message queues, state machines, and tools like Celery, Kafka, Temporal, or Step Functions.
• Strong backend development skills in Python, Go, or TypeScript, with a focus on clean API design, testability, and observability.
• Hands-on experience building multi-channel messaging systems (Slack, email, in-app), including support for templating, delivery retries, and channel fallbacks.
• Familiarity with compliance and governance use cases (e.g., audit trails, access reviews, escalation policies) and how workflows support visibility and traceability at scale.
• A track record of designing developer platforms, internal tools, or infrastructure that improves velocity, reliability, and reusability across teams.

💰 Pay Range

• $190,000 - $240,000 Note that this range is a good faith estimate of likely pay for this role; upon hire, the pay may differ due to skill and/or level of experience.

💸 Benefits and Perks:

• 💯 Remote work culture (+/-4 hours Pacific Time)
• ⛑ Medical, Vision, & Dental coverage covered by Lumos
• 🛩 Company and team bonding trips throughout the year fully covered by Lumos
• 💻 Optimal WFH setup to set you up for success
• 🌴 Unlimited PTO, with minimum time off to make sure you are rested and able to be at your best
• 👶🏽 Up to 16 weeks for expecting parents
• 💰 Wellness stipend to keep you awesome and healthy
• 🏦 401k matching plan