Staff Engineering Manager (Remote - US)

Job Overview

Job Location: Remote US
Anticipated Start Date: 06/01/2026
Salary Range: $225,000 - $300,000

As a Staff Engineering Manager, you will lead and mentor engineering teams across a variety of technical domains. You will drive architectural decisions, ensure engineering excellence, and deliver innovative solutions that impact core freight movement operations. This position is a full‑time remote role where employees may work from anywhere within the contiguous 48 states of the United States. Travel is up to 20% and may include occasional visits to our corporate headquarters in Fort Worth, TX, with travel expenses covered by BNSF.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead a team of 6-10 engineers, guiding end-to-end technical execution.
• Drive technical vision and strategy across distributed systems.
• Mentor junior and senior engineers, fostering a culture of technical excellence.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to align on technical solutions.
• Ensure secure coding practices and platform reliability.
• Own architecture for large-scale systems and make critical technical decisions.
• Translate railroad business requirements into scalable digital solutions.
• Establish engineering best practices, observability, and technical debt management.

Basic Qualifications

• Authorized to work in the US.
• Minimum of 9 years’ experience as a software engineer and/or manager.
• Minimum of 6 years' experience as an engineer.
• 6+ years of programming experience with at least one software programming language.
• Experience with distributed systems and technologies such as Kafka, RabbitMQ, API gateways, SQL/NoSQL/Graph databases, caching systems, and serverless platforms.
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines, Git workflows, and DevOps practices.
• Experience building enterprise products leveraging open-source platform and infrastructure technologies.
• Familiarity with observability stacks (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry).
• Experience with secure coding practices and platform security principles.
• Ability to work in cross-functional teams and communicate with stakeholders.
• Experience participating in design reviews, incident retrospectives, or RFC processes.
• Demonstrated ability to learn new technical concepts and adapt quickly.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills.
• Experience leading multiple teams and delivering cross-organizational platform and products.

Preferred Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree or higher in computer science, or related field.
• Able to work now and in the future without BNSF’s assistance in obtaining, maintaining, or extending employment authorization (including H-1B, STEM OPT/CPT, or TN nonimmigrant status).
• 6+ years of full software development life cycle, including coding standards, code reviews, source control management, build processes, testing, and operations experience.
• Engineering experience with a public PaaS or cloud provider (AWS, Azure, or GCP).
• Experience developing and operating large-scale distributed systems in production.
• Experience with serverless runtimes and event-driven architectures.
• Familiarity with developer tooling as a builder and/or user.
• Interest in sustainable infrastructure and cost/resource awareness.
• Experience with single-pane-of-glass management platforms or control planes for distributed systems.
• Familiarity with frameworks like React, Angular, Node.js, Spring Boot.

Benefits

• An industry-leading 401(k) and renowned Railroad Retirement program.
• Robust health care options for you and your dependents (including domestic partners), including medical, dental, vision, telemedicine, mental health, cancer support, and high-quality care network options.
• Health care spending accounts (HSA) with employer contributions, as well as life and disability insurance, provided at no cost.
• Family benefits including parental, pediatric and family building support, adoption and surrogacy reimbursement, and dependent care spending account (with employer match).
• Access to discounts on travel, gym memberships, counseling services, and wellness support.
• Annual bonus (Incentive Compensation Program).
• Generous leave / time off policies.

BNSF Railway is an Equal Opportunity Employer; all qualified applicants receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability or protected veteran status.