Staff Engineer - Thorn

About Thorn

At Thorn, our cause is our code. We are a nonprofit whose mission of defending children from sexual exploitation and abuse is deeply embedded within our core—a shared code that drives us to do challenging work with resilience and determination.

Here, you'll work and grow among the best hearts and the best minds in tech, data, and business alongside our network of independent partners, NGOs, and law enforcement agencies. Together, we're focused on building technology that protects children's futures. We are looking for dynamic problem solvers with the desire to help address some of today's toughest issues in a remote environment centered on wellness, care, and compassion.

About the Role

Our Safer team develops and operates backend services, APIs, and high-volume data-processing pipelines that help technology companies detect and respond to child sexual abuse material on their platforms. As a Staff Engineer, you will lead high-impact initiatives within the Safer product area, shaping how our systems are designed, built, scaled, and maintained.

In this role, you will drive the design and delivery of complex, multi-system projects, anticipate technical risks, and make sound architectural and implementation decisions that improve reliability, performance, and long-term sustainability. You will partner closely with Product and Engineering to translate broad goals into actionable technical plans and ensure successful delivery.

What You'll Do

• Collaborate with engineers across multiple areas of ownership to build and maintain scalable systems and applications from end-to-end.
• Take on large, complex initiatives independently: identify unknowns, gather input from teammates, break down ambiguous problems, and communicate progress clearly to stakeholders.
• Lead technical discussions across teams, partnering closely with Build and Product to define requirements and arrive together at practical, high-quality approaches.
• Develop solutions to problems faced by users, clearly articulating tradeoffs and decisions to stakeholders across technical and non-technical audiences.
• Take ownership of architectural direction, making sound implementation decisions that strengthen system reliability, scalability, and sustainability over the long term.
• Play a critical role in day-to-day coding, code reviews, and troubleshooting production issues, including participating in on-call rotations to support system reliability and incident response.
• Anticipate technical risks and proactively address them, including identifying and prioritizing technical debt before it becomes a constraint.
• Strengthen teams by sharing expertise, offering thoughtful feedback, mentoring teammates within your domain, and stepping in to help when needed.
• Drive technical innovation by researching and deliberately incorporating new tools, technologies, or patterns where they meaningfully improve products and workflows.

What We're Looking For

Required Qualifications

• A commitment to putting the children we serve at the center of everything you do.
• Substantial experience building and operating backend services in production, including experience with Python.
• Hands-on experience deploying or supporting production applications in Kubernetes (application-level troubleshooting and common resources; deep cluster/platform expertise is not required).
• Experience building and operating services in a production cloud environment.
• Comfort contributing across unfamiliar parts of a codebase or technical domain, learning quickly and adapting as priorities change.
• Strong architectural judgment with consideration for broader system impacts.
• Comfort operating in ambiguous problem spaces and bringing clarity to complex technical challenges as requirements evolve.
• Autonomy and sound judgment in knowing when to seek input from others.
• Ability to make pragmatic technical tradeoffs, delivering useful increments quickly while balancing immediate needs with long-term maintainability.
• Ability to elevate engineers through mentorship, feedback, and shared technical standards.
• Empathy and user advocacy balanced with product vision and engineering constraints.
• Clear, efficient, and thoughtful communication skills suited for a distributed team.

Nice-to-Have Experience

• Building, scaling, and monitoring high-volume systems or data-processing pipelines.
• Building software, platforms, APIs, or tooling for other developers.
• Experience with AWS, Terraform, PostgreSQL, or Elasticsearch.

Technologies We Use

• Python
• TypeScript / Express
• AWS / Terraform
• Docker / Kubernetes
• PostgreSQL / Elasticsearch

Compensation & Work Environment

• Base Salary Range: $150,000 – $207,000/year
• Work Model: Remote-first. Employees work from home most of the time, with occasional travel expected for company-wide gatherings, team offsites, or conferences.