About this role.
Dutchie is seeking a Staff Engineer to provide cross-team technical leadership for a large-scale retail and dispensary software platform. The role combines hands-on backend systems engineering, architecture direction, reliability improvement, and mentorship of other engineers. The engineer will work with product stakeholders and customers to shape scalable, customer-facing solutions, especially for integrations and shared platform challenges. Candidates should bring substantial production-system experience, strong data-modeling skills, and routine use of LLM and agentic workflows to improve engineering delivery. Experience in commerce, POS, payments, AWS, third-party integrations, or cannabis technology is advantageous.
Role DNA
A quick view of the complexity, pace, ownership and collaboration implied by the job description.
Job Complexity
5/5Pace & Pressure
4/5Autonomy Level
5/5Communication Load
5/5Salary analysis
Estimated compensation compared with the broader US market for similar roles.
Core skills
Skills and capabilities most closely associated with this opportunity.
Sample interview questions
I began by mapping the system boundaries, user needs, operational risks, and team dependencies. I wrote a decision document that compared options and trade-offs, aligned stakeholders through working sessions, and delivered the work in incremental milestones with measurable reliability and adoption outcomes.
I would first establish service-level objectives and use production telemetry to identify the most consequential failure modes. From there, I would prioritize observability, resilient dependency patterns, safe deployment controls, data-integrity safeguards, and a roadmap that reduces recurring incidents while protecting delivery velocity.
I start with access patterns, ownership boundaries, consistency requirements, and lifecycle needs rather than selecting a database first. I use relational models for transactional integrity and well-defined relationships, while using non-relational approaches where flexible schemas or high-volume access patterns justify them, with explicit synchronization and governance rules.
I use them to accelerate codebase exploration, draft investigation plans, identify test cases, review changes, and summarize operational signals. I treat outputs as accelerators rather than authorities by validating them with source code, tests, security checks, and production safeguards before acting.
I make my reasoning visible through design reviews, pairing, actionable code feedback, and clear ownership boundaries. I delegate meaningful decisions with context and guardrails, then use regular checkpoints to help engineers grow while ensuring important delivery and operational outcomes remain on track.
About Dutchie
Founded in 2017, Dutchie is a comprehensive technology platform powering dispensary operations, while providing consumers with safe and easy access to cannabis. Dutchie aims to further support the positive societal change the cannabis industry brings to the world through wellness benefits, social justice, and empowering local communities through tax revenue. Powering thousands of dispensaries across 40+ markets throughout the United States and Canada, Dutchie is the leading technology company in the cannabis space and was named in Fast Company’s 10 Most Innovative Companies in North America and listed two years in a row on LinkedIn’s Top 50 Startups.
Dutchie has raised over $600M in funding to date, backed by D1 Capital Partners, Tiger Global, Dragoneer, DFJ Growth, Thrive Capital, Howard Schultz, Snoop Dogg’s Casa Verde Capital, Gron Ventures, members of the founding team at DoorDash, Kevin Durant’s Thirty Five Ventures, and other notable angel investors.
About This Job
We’re hiring a Staff Engineer at Dutchie — someone who works across teams to solve the hardest problems, spot them early, and steer the technical direction so we hit fewer of them down the road.
You’ll work at the core of our platform: making it better, faster, and more reliable; and partner with teams across the org on the integrations and shared problems no single team owns. You’ll shape how we build, including what good engineering looks like when AI is part of everyday work.
The world of cannabis changes constantly, and we optimize our process for meeting that need while maintaining a high quality bar. We push context down, concerns up, and lean on a strong bias for ownership. If that’s your kind of place, let’s talk.
What You’ll Do…
- Make real improvements to enterprise-grade retail software at scale
- Set technical direction — make the architecture calls that shape how systems evolve, and align teams behind them
- Work with stakeholders to scope, sharpen, and stress-test customer-facing features
- Get in front of customers to learn how they work and where it hurts, then turn that into better products
- Partner across the org on unified solutions for problems that span teams
- Mentor other engineers — everyone had help to get here, reinforce your own skills by helping others grow theirs
- Help the team plan, estimate, and de-risk big work by breaking it down and sequencing it well
- Set the bar for engineering judgment, code quality, and craft
What You Bring…
- We’re flexible on years of experience. The depth and influence we’re after usually show up around 8+ years in, but it’s about what you can do, not the number on your résumé.
Engineering depth (the foundation)
- A track record of building and running production systems at scale
- Deep, hands-on experience in at least one modern backend stack — across Dutchie you’ll find .NET/C#, TypeScript, Ruby, and React on the frontend, backed by PostgreSQL, MS SQL, and MongoDB. We care more about how fast you ramp than a perfect stack match on day one
- Experience designing scalable data models across relational and non-relational stores
- Pride in your craft — code that’s clean, tested, and easy for the next person to build on
AI-native ways of working (how you operate)
- You use LLMs routinely — researching unfamiliar systems, diagnosing issues, planning solutions to messy problems, writing and reviewing code, and watching what you ship
- You are comfortable and excited about an agentic first environment. You know how to utilize AI to ship better solutions faster and safer than you could by hand alone.
- You raise the team’s baseline — turning one-off wins into repeatable practices
How you show up (the multipliers)
- You make the people around you better — your biggest impact isn’t just your code, it’s how you raise everyone else’s output and judgment
- You’re genuinely curious about customers, and you let their pain points steer where the team spends its effort
- When a problem spans multiple teams and no one owns the whole thing, you’re the one who scopes it, breaks it into pieces teams can run with, and keeps them pointed the same way
- You can hold several threads at once — a few projects plus the broader technical direction — and reprioritize cleanly when things shift
- You know where process helps and where it’s in the way
- You communicate well — you make hard trade-offs clear to engineers, product, and leadership alike
- You own outcomes, not tasks — from ambiguous to shipped, accountable for how it runs in production
It’s a Bonus if You…
- Have experience in the cannabis industry — building for it, working in it, or just knowing the space
- Have built POS, Ecommerce, Payments, or other retail and commerce technology
- Have built and monitored cloud-native infrastructure (AWS)
- Have deep experience with third-party integrations
- Have brought AI-assisted workflows, tooling, or agents to an engineering team
You’ll Get…
We are targeting a starting salary of $170,000 – $230,000 based on the intended level for this role.
In addition to cash compensation, our total rewards package includes:
- Full medical benefits including dental and vision plans to ensure you always have the best care.
- Equity packages in the form of stock options to all employees.
- Technology (hardware, software, reading materials, etc..) allowance
- Flexible vacation and sick days
At Dutchie, we’re committed to providing an environment of mutual respect where equal employment opportunities are available to all applicants and teammates without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, pregnancy, age, national origin, disability status, genetic information, protected veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law. Dutchie believes that diversity and inclusion among our teammates is critical to our success, and we seek to recruit, develop and retain the most talented people from a diverse candidate pool.
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