Staff Engineer - Backend (Level4)

As a Staff Backend Engineer, you'll drive the design and development of scalable distributed systems, working on high-impact backend services. Beyond writing code, you'll be expected to identify problems before they're assigned to you, make independent calls on ambiguous technical trade-offs, and influence how your team and adjacent teams build software. You'll combine hands-on coding, system design, and technical leadership, owning outcomes, not just deliverables, and helping shape engineering practices beyond your immediate scope.

Responsibilities:

• Design and build scalable distributed systems and microservices.
• Lead development of complex features and technical initiatives end-to-end.
• Drive system design, API design, and engineering best practices.
• Own scalability, performance, reliability, and fault tolerance of services.
• Optimise high-throughput, low-latency systems.
• Proactively identify gaps, risks, or improvement opportunities beyond your assigned scope, and drive them to resolution without waiting to be asked.
• Make independent architectural and technical trade-off decisions, and be accountable for the outcomes.
• Contribute to cross-team collaboration and system alignment; influence engineering standards and practices beyond your immediate 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 with a structured approach, supporting overall team capability growth.
• Participate in technical decision-making and architectural improvements.
• Handle production issues, RCA, and drive continuous improvement.

Requirements:

• 8-12 years of backend engineering experience.
• Strong experience building distributed systems at scale.
• Expertise in: Java, Kotlin, Scala, or Go.
• Strong understanding of microservices architecture, REST APIs and system design, SQL/NoSQL databases, and performance, scalability, and concurrency
• Strong coding and problem-solving ability.

Beyond the technical bar:

• A track record of taking ownership beyond your assigned scope: initiatives you drove because you saw the need, not because you were told.
• Comfort making decisions under ambiguity and owning the consequences, technical and business.
• Experience communicating trade-offs to both engineers and non-technical stakeholders, adjusting your framing accordingly.
• Demonstrated impact mentoring or growing other engineers, with concrete outcomes, not just informal help.

Nice to Have:

• Experience building large-scale consumer or marketplace platforms.
• Exposure to event-driven systems (Kafka, RabbitMQ).
• Experience with NoSQL databases (Cassandra, MongoDB, Aerospike).
• Familiarity with cloud (AWS/GCP) and CI/CD pipelines.
• Experience working in Agile/Scrum environments.