Staff Software Engineer (Cloud/Backend)

At D-Fend Solutions - now proudly part of the Motorola Solutions family - our people are our greatest strength, and technology is our passion. As the global leader in cyber-takeover counter-drone technology, we design and deliver advanced, software-defined solutions that empower our customers to detect, take control, and safely land unauthorized drones.
The Mission in Krakow:
Following the acquisition, our Krakow MSI engineering center is partnering directly with the D-Fend group to drive a technological transformation: moving a critical configuration application to the Cloud. We are assembling an elite, highly agile team capable of diving deep into the existing solution, leveraging Motorola’s vast cloud expertise, and delivering high-impact results at startup speed.
We’re seeking passionate, top-tier professionals who thrive in a fast-paced, creative, and collaborative environment. If you want to build cutting-edge airspace security innovation alongside the best engineers in the industry, this is your place.

Job Description

We are building a powerhouse Cloud/Platform team in Krakow, and we are looking for a Staff Software Engineer to be a part of this group. You will play a crucial role in architecting, implementing, maintaining, and scaling a massive multi-tenant SaaS distributed ecosystem, migrating on-premise components into a modern cloud architecture. You will partner closely with our Architecture team to shape the technical direction, acting as the ultimate subject matter expert (SME) for Node.js.

We are looking for a highly adaptable, heavyweight engineer who is "hot on code" and loves being deeply hands-on.

As a Staff Engineer in this elite team, you must be:

• Highly Adaptable: Completely comfortable and highly effective in a rapidly changing, dynamic environment.

• A Fast Learner: Able to quickly absorb new domain knowledge and master new technologies on the fly.

• Decisive: Capable of making quick, pragmatic, and highly technical decisions without getting stuck in analysis paralysis.

• A Team Player: Ready to collaborate effectively with top-tier engineers, sharing knowledge, and driving collective success.

• A Technical Influencer: You elevate the team's engineering standards by example, providing technical guidance, prototyping architectural solutions, and acting as a sounding board for complex design decisions. 

(Note: While this role is heavily focused on backend engineering and cloud infrastructure, we operate with a strict 'You Build It, You Run It' culture. End-to-end ownership is key, and you will occasionally dive into the frontend (React) to deliver complete features).

What You Will Do:

• Drive the Cloud Transition:Play a hands-on role in designing, building and running multi-tenant SaaS applications designed specifically to take full advantage of cloud-native architecture.

• Architect & Build Distributed Systems: Tackle the most complex technical challenges and influence the design of high-throughput backend services and distributed systems, ensuring seamless data flow across Cloud, On-Premise, and Edge layers.

• Write Exceptional Code: Write sharp, scalable, and maintainable code. You will help set, evolve, and maintain the highest engineering standards and system design practices across the team.

• End-to-End Ownership: Take full ownership of your features - from technical design and backend coding to automated deployment and production monitoring.

• Collaborate & Accelerate: Work shoulder-to-shoulder with senior peers across MSI and D-Fend to leverage shared expertise, unblock technical challenges, and deliver results rapidly.

Basic Requirements

Requirements:

• Experience & Mindset: 8+ years of backend engineering experience. You thrive in a dynamic environment, drive strategic technical decisions, and excel at collaborating with top-tier engineers.

• The Core Stack: Expertise in Node.js and TypeScript (including frameworks like NestJS or Express). You are highly hands-on and write extremely clean, scalable code.

• Cloud & Observability: Strong experience designing and building event-driven microservices in a major cloud provider (AWS, Azure, GCP) and implementing modern Cloud Observability patterns (metrics, distributed tracing, structured logging).

• Data & Infrastructure: Solid proficiency with relational databases (PostgreSQL), in-memory caching (Redis), and containerized environments (Docker, Kubernetes).

• End-to-End Ownership: Practical experience with (or a strong willingness to touch) React to help the team deliver complete, end-to-end features when necessary.

Big Advantages (Bonus Points):

• Infrastructure as Code: Experience treating infrastructure as software using Terraform, AWS CDK, or Serverless Framework.

• AI Tooling: Experience enriching and optimizing development using dev-assisting GenAI tools (such as GitHub Copilot, Claude or Cursor).

• Security & ZTA: Knowledge of Zero Trust Architecture (ZTA) and mTLS.

• Data Scale: Experience with time-series telemetry pipelines and long-term storage tiering.

• Observability: Experience implementing and utilizing observability stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, Datadog).

• System Design Excellence: Proven track record of actively contributing to system architecture, making high-level design choices, and solving hard distributed systems problems.