Staff Backend Engineer

Job description

About this role

Influence Without Bureaucracy: You’ll shape technical direction across teams through clear written proposals and decision records, and partner with Product and Engineering leadership on platform roadmap and investment trade-offs. Frontier AI Work: You’ll lead adoption of AI-assisted and agentic engineering workflows and define the review, quality, security, and privacy guardrails that make them safe to rely on. Autonomy: You’ll thrive in our remote-first, asynchronous organization, where clear written communication and self-direction are the pillars of success.

Responsibilities

• Lead Cross-Cutting Initiatives: Lead the technical design and delivery of large backend initiatives that span teams, and identify and remove systemic bottlenecks across product and infrastructure groups.
• Own Architecture Strategy: Drive modular backend, service, data, and platform architecture. Lead modernization of the monolith and legacy backends toward modular, reusable, and appropriately independently operated systems — while preventing fragmentation and service sprawl.
• Set the Standards: Define and improve standards for APIs, contracts, compatibility, schema evolution, testing, security, performance, observability, operability, and maintainability — plus the build, test, deploy, release, rollback, and production-readiness practices needed to operate modular features safely.
• Establish Shared Patterns: Create the patterns for dependency management, data ownership, eventing, failure isolation, service maturity, and operational documentation. Establish Go service patterns and Kubernetes operating practices where they matter to our production estate, and guide Rust adoption where it solves a real systems, security, performance, or supply-chain problem.

Qualifications and requirements

• Cross-Team Technical Leadership: A sustained record of technical leadership across more than one team or a broad product area.
• Deep Architecture Experience: Deep backend architecture and production experience in complex applications, services, or platforms, including scaling or governing APIs, service platforms, data systems, modular monoliths, or shared backend components.
• Modularization in Production: Experience modernizing a monolith or legacy backend architecture in production, and with modular architecture such as bounded contexts, package encapsulation, ports and adapters, service extraction, event-driven boundaries, or an equivalent approach.
• Influence Without Authority: A strong ability to create alignment through clear written proposals and decision records, so decisions are documented, understood, and adopted without constant escalation.
• Product Judgment: The ability to balance customer outcomes, delivery speed, technical health, reliability, and long-term platform investment.