Staff STA Engineer

We're looking for an STA Engineer (backend) to join our engineering organization. In this role, you will drive the architecture, scalability, and reliability of critical backend systems across multiple teams. You will operate at a strategic level, influencing technical direction, solving highly complex problems, and enabling teams to build robust, high-performing systems. Success in this role means defining long-term technical vision, improving engineering excellence across the organization, and mentoring senior engineers while driving large-scale impact. This position is critical to scaling our platform and supporting Quince's mission of delivering exceptional quality at incredible value.

Responsibilities:

• Own and evolve multiple critical applications/services, ensuring long-term scalability, reliability, and maintainability.
• Lead the design and architecture of complex, large-scale distributed systems, frameworks, and platforms across teams.
• Define and drive the roadmap for engineering and operational excellence at an organizational level.
• Conduct deep performance analysis and lead system-wide optimizations to ensure high scalability and efficiency.
• Drive technical planning, system design reviews, and estimation for large, cross-team initiatives.
• Collaborate with product, data, and infrastructure stakeholders to define ambiguous requirements and translate them into scalable system designs.
• Provide technical leadership and mentorship to senior and mid-level engineers across teams.
• Establish and enforce best practices for coding standards, system design, observability, and reliability.
• Review and guide critical architectural and code decisions across multiple teams.
• Stay ahead of emerging technologies and introduce new architectural patterns to improve system capabilities.
• Raise the engineering bar by actively contributing to hiring, team building, and technical culture.

Requirements:

• Strong computer science fundamentals including data structures, algorithms, and advanced system design.
• 8+ years of experience working on backend and distributed systems.
• Deep expertise in Java, Spring/Spring Boot, and SQL/NoSQL databases.
• Proven experience designing and scaling highly reliable, large-scale distributed systems across multiple services/teams.
• Strong understanding of concurrency, multithreading, and high-performance system design.
• Deep knowledge of system architecture, design principles, and trade-off analysis at scale.
• Experience driving organization-wide technical initiatives and architectural decisions.
• Strong focus on code quality, latency optimization, observability, and system reliability.
• Ability to operate effectively in highly ambiguous, fast-paced environments with significant ownership.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills across technical and business teams.
• Proven track record of mentoring senior engineers and influencing engineering culture.

Preferred:

• Experience with cloud-native architectures (AWS preferred).
• Strong understanding of microservices, event-driven systems, and distributed system patterns.
• Experience leading large-scale system migrations or platform transformations.
• Familiarity with observability tools, monitoring systems, and SRE practices.
• Experience in high-growth startups or scaling consumer internet platforms.
• Passion for building platforms that enable teams to move faster with high reliability.