Senior Software Engineer

TThe Role

We are hiring a Staff Backend Software Engineer to own the architecture and scaling of our core platform. This is a hands-on role: you will design and ship the systems that everything else is built on, set the technical bar for the backend team, and make the build-vs-buy and architecture calls that a company only gets to make once. You will report directly to [VP Engineering / CTO] and work with founders on technical direction.

What You Will Do

• Design, build, and operate distributed backend systems that scale with the business: APIs, data pipelines, and core services with real reliability and latency requirements.
• Own major architectural decisions end to end: technology choices, service boundaries, data modeling, and migration paths.
• Set the engineering standard: raise code quality, drive design reviews, and mentor senior and mid-level engineers without becoming a full-time manager.
• Work directly with product and founders to turn ambiguous business problems into shipped systems, fast.
• Carry production ownership: instrumentation, on-call, incident response, and postmortems that actually change the system.

What We Look For

• 8+ years building backend systems in production, with clear evidence of increasing scope and technical ownership.
• A track record at companies known for a high engineering bar: top-tier technology companies, high-growth startups, or equivalently demanding environments where you shipped systems at scale.
• Deep expertise in at least one modern backend language (Go, Java, Python, Rust, or similar) and strong distributed-systems fundamentals: consistency, queuing, caching, observability.
• Experience owning architecture for systems serving significant scale (high throughput, large data volumes, or strict latency budgets) and living with the consequences of your decisions.
• Strong computer science foundations. Many of our engineers come from top CS programs; what matters is that you reason from first principles, not that you memorized a syllabus.
• Bias for shipping. You have operated in environments where speed mattered and quality was not negotiable, and you know how to hold both.

Nice to Have

• Experience taking a system from single-service to distributed, or from thousands to millions of users.
• Exposure to ML/AI infrastructure, data-intensive platforms, or event-driven architectures.
• Prior startup experience at Series A-C stage, or founding-engineer scope at a larger company.