Staff Software Engineer, Data

At Bayer we’re visionaries, driven to solve the world’s toughest challenges and striving for a world where 'Health for all Hunger for none’ is no longer a dream, but a real possibility. We’re doing it with energy, curiosity and sheer dedication, always learning from unique perspectives of those around us, expanding our thinking, growing our capabilities and redefining ‘impossible’. There are so many reasons to join us. If you’re hungry to build a varied and meaningful career in a community of brilliant and diverse minds to make a real difference, there’s only one choice.

Staff Software Engineer, Data 

The world's farmers make high-stakes decisions every season — and the platforms built by Digital Farming Solutions Engineering are what makes those decisions smarter. As a Staff Engineer, your role is to ensure those platforms are architected for scale, reliability, and the demands of AI and machine learning at a global level.   

You will set technical direction, define how teams approach complex problems across precision agriculture data, geospatial imagery, and cloud infrastructure, and resolve the systemic challenges that no single team can solve alone. Equally important, you will raise the engineering culture around you — mentoring senior engineers into Staff-level leaders, championing best practices, and ensuring that what we build today is maintainable, extensible, and worthy of the mission it serves.   

This role combines staff-level backend engineering leadership with deep expertise in distributed systems, data-intensive platforms, and real-time architectures. You will define technical direction, drive architectural quality, and help teams solve systemic problems that no single team can solve alone, while building cloud-native systems across AWS and/or GCP. 

YOUR TASKS AND RESPONSIBILITIES  

The primary responsibilities of this role are: 

• Define and drive technical strategy for high-priority backend and data platform initiatives.  

• Bring clarity to ambiguous, high-complexity problems and translate them into actionable technical direction.  

• Design and build highly scalable distributed systems across AWS and/or GCP.  

• Build backend services, microservices, APIs, and data-intensive processing systems.  

• Develop event-driven architectures using Kafka, Kinesis, Pub/Sub, SQS/SNS.  

• Architect streaming systems using Spark, Flink, or equivalent.  

• Work with geospatial data including satellite imagery and precision agriculture datasets.  

• Build systems handling petabyte-scale data and streaming-through-file patterns.  

• Set engineering standards for reliability, observability, and code quality.  

• Mentor senior engineers and drive technical excellence.  

• Collaborate with product, data science, and platform teams. 

WHO YOU ARE 

Bayer seeks an incumbent who possesses the following: 

Required: 

• BS or equivalent in Computer Science or related technical field or equivalent combination of education and experience   

• 8+ years of experience in software and data engineering.  

• Proven history of ability to quickly learn new skills and technologies   

• Expert knowledge in at least one modern backend programming language (e.g., Python, Java) with the ability to write understandable, testable code with an eye towards maintainability.   

• Experience with containerized and cloud-native development, including technologies such as Docker and CI/CD-driven delivery workflows.   

• Strong understanding of at least one public cloud platform.   

• Experience building APIs and backend platforms for data products.  

• Strong knowledge of software development methodologies and best practices.   

• Experience using data and service observability techniques to drive support and improvements of systems   

• Strong experience with event driven architectures using messaging middleware (SQS, JMS, etc.)    

• Proficiency with managing CICD pipelines (e.g., GitLab Pipelines, GitHub Actions)  

• Experience building distributed systems in AWS and/or GCP.  

• Experience supporting AI/ML data workflows through robust data pipelines.  

• Strong system design and problem-solving skills. 

Preferred: 

• Experience with Spark, Flink, Dataflow, Dataproc.  

• Experience with Docker and cloud-native development.  

• Experience building scalable data platforms or lakehouses. (Strong Plus)  

• Experience with layered geospatial data structures, data representations  and processing frameworks (Strong Plus)   

• Experience supporting ML/AI platforms such as feature stores or training/inference data pipelines. (Strong Plus )  

• Experience building self-serve data platforms, backend data products, or APIs consumed by downstream engineering, analytics, or AI/ML workflows. (Strong Plus)  

• Proven ability to develop other strong senior engineers into Staff engineers, operating and leading their own initiatives with org-wide scope and high impact.   

Employees can expect to be paid a salary of approximately $117k-171k. Additional compensation may include a bonus or incentive program (if relevant).  Additional benefits include health care, vision, dental, retirement, PTO, sick leave, etc..  This salary (or salary range) is merely an estimate and may vary based on an applicant’s location, market data/ranges, an applicant’s skills and prior relevant experience, certain degrees and certifications, and other relevant factors. 

This posting will be available for application until at least 7/20/26.