Principal/Staff Backend Engineer - Distributed Systems

Salary: $170,000 - 200,000 per year Requirements:

• At least 7 years of backend engineering experience at Staff or Principal level, or equivalent demonstrated scope.
• Proven experience building, shipping, and operating production systems under real workloads.
• Experience with large-scale, latency-sensitive services.
• Hands-on technical orientation and interest in remaining an individual contributor rather than moving into management or advisory work.
• Ability to own problems from initial design through production without handoffs.
• For the distributed services and infrastructure track: expertise in distributed systems, multitenancy, workload isolation, resource fairness, queuing, scheduling, admission control, backpressure, tail-latency management, performance tuning, reliability, failure recovery, incident response, large-scale relational or NoSQL data stores, infrastructure as code, and deployment automation.
• For the unstructured data and document pipelines track: experience with high-volume document ingestion and transformation, search and retrieval systems, data modeling for heterogeneous document collections, SQL, Cosmos DB or comparable distributed data stores, asynchronous processing, deduplication, document threading, metadata extraction, and content enrichment.

• Design and operate services that process very high query and data volumes in a shared, multi-tenant environment.
• Build systems that remain fast, fair, and predictable across varying customer workloads.
• Ensure systems fail gracefully, recover predictably, and remain healthy without manual intervention.
• Identify and remove bottlenecks across complex, multi-stage data pipelines.
• Establish practical engineering patterns for teammates to adopt.
• Own architecture, implementation, infrastructure, code, deployment configuration, observability, and on-call operations.
• Drive the evolution of a production platform while maintaining deep technical ownership.

• Backend
• Cosmos DB
• NoSQL
• SQL
• Cloud

More:

We are partnering with a venture-backed technology company to fill two newly opened Staff and Principal-level backend engineering roles, hiring one engineer for each of two distinct technical tracks. The platform is already in production and operates at scale, so these roles focus on ownership of complex, high-volume systems rather than a greenfield build. The work spans distributed services and infrastructure or unstructured data and document pipelines. This is a direct-hire, full-time, remote-friendly position with a base salary of $170,000–$200,000, depending on experience and background, plus meaningful equity and comprehensive benefits. Equity grant details are provided during the interview process, and the final offer depends on experience, depth, and qualifications.

last updated 41 week of 2026