Staff Backend Engineer, Core DevOps

This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Staff Backend Engineer, Core DevOps based in the United States. As a Staff Backend Engineer, you will provide technical leadership across multiple teams and drive large-scale backend initiatives. You will help modernize complex backend systems into modular, maintainable, and scalable architectures. The role combines hands-on technical leadership with influence over engineering standards, architecture, and platform strategy. You will collaborate closely with Product, Infrastructure, Security, Data, Frontend, and Engineering leadership. You will help improve reliability, security, performance, observability, and operational excellence across critical systems. Working in a fully remote and asynchronous environment, you will communicate technical decisions clearly and independently. You will also mentor engineers and help teams adopt AI-assisted and agentic development workflows responsibly. \n Accountabilities: - Lead the technical design and delivery of backend initiatives spanning multiple teams, identifying and resolving systemic engineering bottlenecks. - Drive modular backend, service, data, and platform architecture, including the modernization of monolithic and legacy systems while avoiding unnecessary service fragmentation. - Define and improve engineering standards covering APIs, contracts, compatibility, schema evolution, testing, security, performance, observability, operability, and maintainability. - Establish effective patterns for dependency management, data ownership, event-driven architectures, failure isolation, service maturity, and operational documentation. - Guide Go service architecture and Kubernetes operating practices where appropriate, while supporting the adoption of Rust for systems, security, performance, and supply-chain requirements.

- Participate in on-call rotations and incident response, acting as a technical escalation point for complex production issues and turning incident learnings into lasting improvements. - Partner with Product and Engineering leadership to shape platform roadmaps, technical priorities, and investment decisions. - Mentor Senior and Intermediate engineers, reduce technical debt, and develop reusable patterns that improve engineering productivity and team throughput. - Lead the responsible adoption of AI-assisted and agentic engineering workflows, ensuring appropriate quality, security, privacy, and operational safeguards. Requirements: - Demonstrated experience leading significant technical initiatives across multiple engineering teams or broad product areas. - Deep backend architecture and production experience with complex applications, services, platforms, APIs, data systems, modular monoliths, or shared backend components. - Proven experience modernizing monolithic or legacy backend architectures in production using approaches such as bounded contexts, package encapsulation, ports and adapters, service extraction, or event-driven boundaries. - Strong ability to build technical alignment through clear written proposals, architecture documentation, and decision records. - Experience balancing customer outcomes, delivery speed, technical health, reliability, and long-term platform investments. - Strong mentoring and leadership skills, with experience shaping engineering standards through code reviews, documentation, and established practices. - Production experience using AI-assisted or agentic engineering workflows and improving how teams integrate these tools into their development processes. - Strong communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to influence technical direction without relying on formal authority. - Comfortable working independently in a remote, asynchronous engineering environment. Benefits: - Base salary range of $152,800–$259,200 USD for eligible United States-based employees.