Staff Software Engineer, Backend

Role overview A staff-level backend engineering role shaping the technical direction of distributed messaging systems that deliver billions of emails, push notifications, in-app messages, and SMS each day. The position focuses less on shipping volume and more on high-stakes architectural decisions, mentorship, and raising the technical ceiling for the wider engineering organization.

Responsibilities - Set high-level technical direction for distributed messaging services written in Go, balancing scale, cost, and reliability for mission-critical workloads. - Take ownership of ambiguous, cross-squad problems and drive them to decisions when the right answer is not yet obvious. - Build consensus on contested technical questions and communicate tradeoffs clearly enough for senior leadership to act on. - Raise the department's bar through quality and design standards, mentorship of senior engineers, and durable documentation and frameworks. - Drive engineering process and tooling improvements that span multiple squads rather than a single team. - Interview candidates and calibrate against the engineering career ladder using honest, evidence-based assessments. - Use AI agents to perform multi-file changes by scoping work, writing prompts, and verifying outputs.

Requirements - Ten or more years building scalable, distributed systems in Go or a similar statically typed language, including time as the go-to architect on complex services. - Recognized depth across multiple systems or domains rather than a single specialty. - A track record of designing for production reality by quantifying tradeoffs in throughput, cost, and reliability. - Experience treating observability and recovery as first-class concerns, including metrics, alerting, rollback, backpressure, and checkpointing. - Comfort working in cloud-native environments such as AWS or GCP, with relational databases and a real understanding of performance tradeoffs. - Evidence of making other engineers better through mentorship, technical writing, design review, and standards that outlast direct involvement. - A bias for action over perfection, with the judgment to know which decisions are worth slowing down for.

Benefits and work setup - Starting salary of approximately $200,000 to $240,000 USD (or local equivalent), plus a 10 percent annual bonus target. - 100 percent coverage of medical, dental, vision, mental health, and supplemental insurance premiums for employees and their families. - Sixteen weeks of paid parental leave, unlimited PTO, remote work and wellness stipends, a professional development budget, and additional perks. - Structured interview process with a recruiter call, hiring manager interview, architecture conversation, take-home assignment, and assignment review call, plus standard pre-employment background checks.