Senior / Staff Software Engineer (Python/C++Backend + Windows/Excel COM Automation)
Location: USA - Remote
Employment Type: Full Time
Experience Level: Senior Staff (14 years)
rachael@sidramtech.com
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.