Staff Backend Engineer, Core DevOps

Role overview

Provide staff-level technical leadership for backend systems and shared DevOps capabilities in a large software platform. This role leads initiatives that cross team boundaries, guides the modernization of a substantial monolith into modular and appropriately independent systems, and establishes engineering standards that improve delivery speed without sacrificing security, reliability, performance, or operability. Success depends on influence, architectural judgment, and the ability to turn complex technical direction into reusable practices.

Responsibilities

- Lead the design and delivery of backend initiatives spanning multiple teams, while identifying and removing systemic bottlenecks. - Drive modular architecture across services, data, and platforms, including careful modernization of legacy systems without creating unnecessary fragmentation. - Define standards for APIs, compatibility, schema evolution, testing, security, observability, performance, maintainability, and operational readiness. - Establish patterns for dependency management, data ownership, eventing, failure isolation, service maturity, and incident documentation. - Guide Go service patterns and Kubernetes operations, and evaluate Rust adoption where it provides meaningful systems, security, performance, or supply-chain benefits. - Participate in on-call and incident response, act as a technical escalation point, and convert incident lessons into lasting improvements.

Requirements

- Demonstrated record of leading technical work across multiple teams or a broad product area. - Deep production experience with complex backend applications, APIs, service platforms, data systems, modular monoliths, or shared backend components. - Experience modernizing monolithic or legacy backend architectures using techniques such as bounded contexts, clear ownership boundaries, and incremental migration. - Strong judgment around product tradeoffs, architecture, reliability, security, operational complexity, and long-term maintainability. - Ability to communicate technical decisions clearly in writing and influence product, infrastructure, security, data, and engineering leadership without relying on formal authority. - Experience mentoring senior and intermediate engineers and improving team throughput through reusable patterns and reduced technical debt.

Nice to have

- Experience with AI-assisted or agentic engineering workflows, including appropriate quality, privacy, security, and operational controls. - Experience in open-core or large-scale software platforms, or with systems spanning web applications, command-line tools, and code collaboration workflows.

Benefits and work setup

This is an all-remote role with an asynchronous working model and some country-specific eligibility requirements. The listed United States base salary range is $152,800-$259,200, excluding bonuses, equity, and benefits. The package includes flexible paid time off, equity compensation and an employee stock purchase plan, a growth and development fund, parental leave, and employee resource groups.