Staff Software Engineer

About the Role

IAA is seeking a highly experienced Staff Engineer to join the US Operations Platform organization. This role is focused on modernizing and scaling mission-critical operational applications that support auction, logistics, titles, payments, and yard operations across the United States. You will provide hands-on technical leadership in evolving legacy systems into modern, cloud-native .NET applications, while improving reliability, performance, and long-term maintainability.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead application modernization initiatives, including migration from legacy .NET Framework to modern .NET (.NET Core / latest LTS).
• Drive architectural design for scalable, modular services and APIs supporting high-volume operational workflows.
• Partner with Product and Architecture to decompose monolithic applications into well-defined domains and services.
• Define and implement modern data-access patterns using ORMs, repository patterns, and controlled schema migrations.
• Improve system performance, resilience, and fault tolerance through sound design practices (timeouts, retries, idempotency, and graceful degradation).
• Establish and enforce engineering standards for code quality, testing, and maintainability.
• Embed observability into applications using structured logging, metrics, and distributed tracing (OpenTelemetry).
• Design secure-by-default application patterns including authentication, authorization, secrets management, and secure coding practices.
• Lead technical discovery and solution design for complex, cross-team initiatives.
• Mentor senior and mid-level engineers through design reviews, code reviews, and hands-on technical guidance.
• Support and coordinate “level 3” incidents including after hours as necessary
• Collaborate closely with Infrastructure, Security, Data, and Operations teams to ensure solutions meet operational and compliance requirements.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with significant time spent modernizing large-scale applications.
• Demonstrated experience operating at a Staff or Principal Engineer level, influencing architecture and technical direction.
• Deep expertise in C#, .NET, .NET Core, and modern application development practices.
• Strong experience designing RESTful APIs and service-oriented or domain-driven architectures.
• Hands-on experience modernizing legacy systems and databases in production environments.
• Strong understanding of relational databases and modern data-access strategies.
• Experience with cloud platforms (Azure preferred) and cloud-native application patterns.
• Excellent communication skills with the ability to clearly explain technical tradeoffs to engineering and business stakeholders.
• Proven ability to lead through influence, mentor engineers, and raise overall engineering quality.

Bonus Experience

• Experience with high-throughput, transaction-heavy operational systems.
• Exposure to event-driven or asynchronous architectures.
• Experience modernizing applications in regulated or compliance-sensitive environments.
• Familiarity with front-end modernization (e.g., React) as part of full-stack initiatives.