About the role
As a Staff Backend Engineer, you'll own the design and reliability of a critical service or domain end-to-end, from architecture through production. Beyond writing code, you'll be expected to identify problems before they're assigned to you, make independent calls on ambiguous technical trade-offs within your domain, and raise the technical bar for your immediate team. You'll combine hands-on coding, system design, and technical ownership, accountable for outcomes within your service and a trusted technical voice when your work touches adjacent teams.
Responsibilities:
- Design, build, and own scalable distributed systems and microservices within your domain.
- Lead development of complex features and technical initiatives end-to-end within your service or team.
- Drive system design, API design, and engineering best practices for your team.
- Own scalability, performance, reliability, and fault tolerance of the services you're responsible for.
- Optimize high-throughput, low-latency systems.
- Proactively identify gaps, risks, or improvement opportunities in your domain, and drive them to resolution without waiting to be asked.
- Make independent architectural and technical trade-off decisions within your service's scope, and be accountable for the outcomes.
- Collaborate with adjacent teams when your service's boundaries or dependencies require it, and raise engineering standards within your own team.
- Partner with product and business stakeholders to translate business needs into technical priorities and technical constraints into business context.
- Stay hands-on with coding and system design.
- Mentor engineers on your team with a structured approach, supporting their growth.
- Handle production issues within your domain, drive RCA, and lead follow-through improvements.
Requirements:
- 8-12 years of backend engineering experience.
- Strong experience building and owning distributed systems at scale within a service or domain.
- Expertise in Java, Kotlin, Scala, or Go.
- Strong understanding of microservices architecture, REST APIs, system design, SQL/NoSQL databases, and performance, scalability, and concurrency.
- Strong coding and problem-solving ability.
- A track record of taking ownership beyond assigned tasks by driving initiatives within your domain because you saw the need.
- Comfort making decisions under ambiguity and owning the technical and business consequences within your area of ownership.
- Experience communicating trade-offs to both engineers and non-technical stakeholders, adjusting your framing accordingly.
- Demonstrated impact mentoring or growing engineers on your team, with concrete outcomes.
Nice To Have:
- Experience building large-scale consumer or marketplace platforms.
- Exposure to event-driven systems such as Kafka or RabbitMQ.
- Experience with NoSQL databases such as Cassandra, MongoDB, or Aerospike.
- Familiarity with cloud platforms such as AWS or GCP and CI/CD pipelines.
- Experience working in Agile or Scrum environments.