Senior/Staff Software Engineer

Location: USA - Remote

Employment Type: Full Time

Experience Level: Senior–Staff (8–14 years)

Role Overview:

We are looking for a strong software engineer who is a highly capable Python/C++ engineer with deep, hands-on production experience who also brings a specialized skill: automating desktop Microsoft Excel and its COM/VSTO add-ins as a reliable server workload.

You will help build a server-side Excel execution engine for a Fortune 500 financial-services client — opening macro-heavy, add-in-dependent valuation workbooks programmatically on Windows, letting proprietary and third-party add-ins (e.g., Capital IQ) recalculate, capturing results, and safely versioning them back to cloud storage

The ideal candidate is a strong engineer who can own services, integrations, and reliability engineering end to end — and who has genuinely wrestled real Excel + COM add-ins into a dependable, scaled pipeline.

Key Responsibilities:

• Design, build, and operate production-grade backend services in Python — clean, tested, observable, and maintainable.
• Own Excel execution engine: open workbooks, resolve add-ins, invoke an approved action, recalculate, and capture structured output with provenance.
• Design interactive, session-isolated Windows/Excel workers and Preserve add-in behavior— real desktop sessions, which the COM add-ins require — and keep each run cleanly separated from the others.
• Orchestrate the worker pool: distribute runs across many Excel workers with queues, scheduling, retries, and idempotency, so hundreds of workbooks flow through reliably and with built-in failure recovery
• Validate outputs: confirm each run produced a complete, well-formed result (expected sheets/values present, no error states, integrity/hash checks) before it is trusted or written back.
• Engineer for capacity: size and tune the worker pool to process the full workbook volume within the monthly-close window — concurrency limits, load/soak testing, and throughput/bottleneck analysis.
• Contribute across the stack — system integration, debugging, performance optimization in a legacy-and-modern environment.
• Collaborate with the Solution Architect on boundaries and with DevOps on VM imaging, scaling, and deployment; document and transfer knowledge.

Required Technical Skills:

• 8–13 years of professional software engineering with strong Python skills.
• Proven track record building and operating complex production backend services and APIs — reusable components, testing, error handling, performance, and observability.
• Strong engineering fundamentals: concurrency, data structures, debugging, and pragmatic performance optimization.
• Comfortable across the stack and across technologies — storage, queues, cloud, CI/CD — and navigating both legacy and modern systems.
• Ownership mindset: takes capability from design through production reliability and support.
• Deep hands-on experience automating desktop Excel via COM / Office interop, including interactive session design for running Office unattended on Windows servers.
• Running macro-heavy workbooks and third-party COM/Office add-ins programmatically: recalculation, add-in authentication/licensing, and preserving add-in behavior server-side.
• Experience making a normally unreliable stack dependable — failure recovery (hang/crash detection, restart, dialog handling), output validation, and capacity/throughput engineering for concurrent runs.

We ARE looking for engineers who:

• Are excellent Python/backend engineers who build enterprise grade production systems well, and
• Have real, demonstrable server-side Excel + COM add-in automation experience, and
• Can wrap a fragile desktop-Office stack in robust, observable, scalable services.

Good to Have:

• Domain exposure to financial services / asset management / buy-side valuation workflows.
• Reading/maintaining VBA macros; VSTO / .NET Office interop.
• Direct experience with vendor Office add-ins — Capital IQ, Bloomberg, FactSet, MSCI, or similar.
• RPA familiarity (UiPath, Power Automate) as a fallback where UI-level automation is unavoidable.
• Observability (OpenTelemetry), IaC (Terraform), containerization, and Azure.
• Delivery in regulated / audited environments (access control, evidence, change control).