AI-native Staff Backend Engineer

AI-native Staff Backend Engineer

Join one of our cross-functional teams in Motors, Real Estate, OLX Classifieds, or Platforms, working remotely from Portugal.

Are you someone who is craving scalable problems and dealing with optimizations?

You'll work with a creative, critical, and well-organized team from the comfort of your house, but as close as we have ever been!

You will play a key role in enabling our organization to scale efficiently.

Who we are looking for:

• You can use agentic workflows (Claude Code, Cursor Agent, or equivalent) as your default, not as a novelty.
• You practice context engineering, not just prompt engineering; you design the full information architecture an AI agent needs to succeed: repo structure, CLAUDE.md / AGENTS.md configs, relevant code context, memory, and tool access.
• You understand model routing trade-offs (e.g., when to use Haiku vs. Sonnet vs. Opus) and multi-agent orchestration.
• Strong ownership instinct: AI output is a first draft, not a deliverable; you validate, refactor, and take full accountability.
• You have strong coding and computer science fundamentals. Roughly ⅔ of your time will be hands-on technical work: designing solutions, steering and reviewing AI-generated code, developing new ideas, and reviewing others' contributions. The rest goes to cross-team influence, mentoring, and strategic alignment.
• Strong background experience in Golang, Java/Kotlin (preferred technologies), and able to work with PHP. Flexible and capable of adjusting to changing project requirements, roles, and backend technologies as needed.
• Scalable systems expertise. Experience with large-scale web applications, an economic-thinking mindset, and being able to design well-bounded future-proof domain systems, aligned with the business objectives.
• Deep expertise in scalable distributed systems, CI/CD, RESTful and GraphQL APIs, AWS, and relational + NoSQL databases.
• Big-picture thinker: aligns technical decisions with business strategy, influences without authority.
• Clear communicator in English across engineering, product, and leadership audiences.
• Self-starter who identifies what needs doing and takes initiative without waiting to be asked.
• Skilled technical leader and mentor: guide and support engineers by setting a strong example. As a Staff Engineer, you are a role model, leading by example and through your expertise.

What you will be doing:

• Architect context pipelines for AI agents: curate what enters the context window (repo boundaries, domain knowledge, test outputs, CI feedback) so agents produce reliable, mergeable code, not just plausible code.
• Prepare task specifications that are agent-actionable (clear acceptance criteria, referenced modules, explicit constraints)
• Design and maintain agent-ready systems: well-bounded repos, comprehensive test suites as guardrails, CI/CD pipelines with structured output agents can parse and act on.
• Serve as an AI Champion: join and strengthen our growing AI Champion community, contribute to workshops, curate effective agentic workflows, and mentor engineers on AI-assisted practices. Contribute to org-level AI tooling evaluations and OLX AI practices repositories.
• Drive active migration from a legacy monolith to microservices, owning decisions on bounded domain decomposition. Working on making agentic workflows effective across a codebase whose boundaries are actively being redefined.
• Set the bar for GraphQL API design, RESTful contracts, database schema, and CI/CD quality across the tribe.
• Work with product and engineering leadership to identify high-value problems, propose initiatives, and drive impactful technical direction without direct authority
• Guide senior engineers in managing and reducing technical debt with AI as an accelerator, not a shortcut.

Our Hiring Process:

• Recruiter Interview
• Head of Engineering Interview
• Live Coding
• System Design

Our Benefits

• Permanent contract
• Salary + annual bonus up to 20% of your annual gross salary
• Work with and impact all OLX websites around the world
• Train and conference budget, and free access to Udemy courses
• Health insurance and life insurance
• MacBook Pro or a Windows Dell, along with the necessary accessories to make your work comfortable
• 100% remote work (and the possibility to work from our office in Lisboa)

If you think this is the role for you, send your application in English and let's talk!

Diversity, equity, and inclusion at OLX

OLX values diversity and welcomes applicants of all races, ethnicities, disabilities, ages, genders, sexual orientations, religions, backgrounds, and experiences to apply. If this role excites you, we encourage you to apply, even if you don't meet all the requirements - you may be just the right fit for this or other opportunities with us!

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