Chief Software Engineer

Position Overview

Wing, part of Alphabet, offers drone delivery as a safe, fast, and sustainable solution for last mile logistics. We are on a mission to create the preferred means of delivery for the planet by integrating our highly automated delivery drones into existing logistics networks. We are seeking a Chief Software Engineer to join our Technology Organization. This high-impact role is designed for a senior technical architect and technical mentor who will work remotely in the United States—with occasional collaboration in our Palo Alto, CA office—to design, build, and scale our reliable and scalable drone delivery network.

Key Responsibilities

• Integrate deeply with our engineering teams by debugging complex issues, participating in design sessions, and understanding our production systems firsthand to effectively lead and influence change.
• Drive strategic initiatives and process development to increase the reliability, quality, and efficiency of the Wing delivery network, ensuring our software architecture can scale with the business.
• Analyze and review system designs, architecture, production systems, and team practices to uncover systemic issues and opportunities for improvement across Wing's software.
• Synthesize findings into a clear vision by creating and owning foundational Software Engineering Principles along with a strategic roadmap for enhancing reliability and observability.
• Educate and upskill the entire software organization by establishing formal curriculum and processes, developing training materials, and mentoring engineers on software design and production excellence.
• Lead post-incident reviews as a key escalation point for major outages, driving decisions and follow-through to prevent future failures.
• Advocate for the engineering organization, using data-driven insights to influence technical direction and investment at the leadership level.
• Champion a collaborative engineering culture by mentoring software engineering leaders and fostering an environment of continuous improvement, while representing Wing's technical excellence through recruiting, industry outreach, and conference presentations.

Required Qualifications

• 15+ years of professional experience including significant work in Software Engineering, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), and large-scale distributed systems.
• Expertise in designing, analyzing, and troubleshooting complex, large-scale distributed systems.
• A deep and practical understanding of modern reliability principles, including incident management, post-mortem culture, and SLO/SLI development.
• Demonstrated ability to drive strategic technical decisions across large organizations.
• Proven experience as an educator and mentor with a passion for developing technical curriculum and processes for other engineers.
• High emotional intelligence and empathy to earn the trust of engineering teams.
• Mature data analysis skills to inform technical strategy and investment.
• Exceptional communication and influencing skills with the ability to work horizontally across a large engineering organization.