Staff Software Engineer

Company Description

Planned Parenthood Direct (PPDirect) provides the virtual care infrastructure on behalf of Planned Parenthood, delivering trusted sexual and reproductive health care via the PPDirect web/mobile app. Our mission is to enable Planned Parenthood care from anywhere, ensuring accessible care for patients on the go. We partner directly with Planned Parenthood’s regional affiliates, which operate Planned Parenthood’s local health centers, to extend care beyond the clinic walls and to meet patient access needs nationwide. 

About the Role

At Planned Parenthood Direct, every line of code ships with a purpose: to make sure that anyone, anywhere, can access healthcare — regardless of geography, income, or circumstance. Our platform is the technical backbone of that promise. It powers telehealth visits for patients in rural and underserved communities, supports clinicians delivering care at Planned Parenthood affiliates nationwide, and keeps critical services running reliably when patients need them most.

We're building infrastructure that sits at the intersection of technology and patient care. The work engineers do here shapes how people experience some of the most important moments of their lives. If you want your technical work to mean something in the real world, this is a rare opportunity to do exactly that.

We are looking for an experienced Staff Engineer to drive the technical outcome of key initiatives across our engineering organization. This role sits at the Staff Engineering level on our career ladder, which requires demonstrated experience leading significant technical projects and the proven ability to plan, execute, and deliver complex work at scale.

What You’ll Do

Technical Leadership

• Serve as engineering leader on one or more significant projects, taking full end-to-end technical responsibility from planning through delivery.

• Define and communicate architecture approaches, ensuring scalability, reliability, and maintainability across the stack.

• Anticipate risks before they become blockers; build and own deployment, monitoring, and rollback plans for your team’s projects.

• Challenge business context and make persuasive cases for technical approaches when requirements need refinement.

• Scope and stage work into well-defined milestones to avoid monolithic deliverables and maintain team momentum.

Engineering Execution

• Produce and review high-quality, well-tested code across the TypeScript monorepo (React, React Native, Node/Lambda, tRPC, Redux-Saga).

• Identify and proactively resolve technical debt before it becomes a material cost to the team.

• Research and propose new technologies that keep the platform ahead of scale and security requirements.

Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Work closely with Product to drive requirements that take all parties’ needs into account.

• Communicate technical decisions clearly through design documents, tech talks, and Confluence documentation.

• Partner with QA to deliver work that is well-baked, thoroughly tested, and carries minimal regression risk.

• Represent engineering in high-stakes cross-functional discussions; proactively surface technical constraints and opportunities.

Team & Culture

• Meet regularly with project team members when acting as Tech Lead; provide frequent, constructive feedback on their work.

• Mentor junior and mid-level engineers through pairing, design review, and thorough code review.

• Work with engineering leadership to foster team growth, employee development, and retention.

• Help set team norms around code quality, process, and engineering standards; get buy-in on solutions rather than mandating them.

How You’ll Do It

Our engineering culture is anchored on three principles: Consistency, Velocity, and Accountability. In practice, this means writing design documents before building, surfacing risks proactively, closing the loop with stakeholders on decisions, and treating mentorship as a first-class engineering responsibility.

What We’re Looking For

Required

• 6+ years of professional software engineering experience, including meaningful time in a senior or tech lead capacity.

• Demonstrated experience as a Tech Lead: having owned end-to-end technical responsibility for at least one significant, delivered project.

• Strong proficiency in TypeScript/JavaScript and Node.js, with experience in React or React Native.

• Comfort working across frontend, backend, and infrastructure layers — you don’t need to be an expert everywhere, but you must be credible at the seams.

• Experience with serverless or event-driven architectures (AWS Lambda, SQS, or equivalent).

• Solid grounding in relational databases (PostgreSQL or MySQL), caching strategies, and API design.

• Experience creating design documents and communicating architecture decisions to both technical and non-technical audiences.

• Strong ability to scope ambiguous projects, identify risks early, and stage work into milestones.

Preferred

• Experience in healthcare, telehealth, or other regulated/compliance-heavy domains (HIPAA awareness a plus).

• Hands-on experience with PHP/Laravel in a production environment.

• Familiarity with payments infrastructure (Stripe, ACH, payment driver patterns).

• History of mentoring engineers and making measurable improvements to team culture or process.

Benefits and Perks

In addition to compensation that reflects the nonprofit nature of our work and the scale of our mission, we offer:

• Robust medical, dental, and vision plans plus FSA & HSA options for employees and dependents

• 401K with company match

• Generous time off and paid parental leave policies

• Work from home and wellness reimbursements

• Annual professional development stipend to support employee growth and advancement

• Clear engineering career ladder with transparent promotion criteria

• Inclusive and collaborative team culture where every voice — and every commit — is valued

No Recruiters. Must have US work authorization.