Senior Software Engineer

We are hiring a Staff Backend Software Engineer to own the architecture and scaling of our core platform. This is a hands-on role: you will design and ship the systems that everything else is built on, set the technical bar for the backend team, and make the build-vs-buy and architecture calls that a company only gets to make once. You will report directly to [VP Engineering / CTO] and work with founders on technical direction. What You Will Do Design, build, and operate distributed backend systems that scale with the business: APIs, data pipelines, and core services with real reliability and latency requirements. Own major architectural decisions end to end: technology choices, service boundaries, data modeling, and migration paths. Set the engineering standard: raise code quality, drive design reviews, and mentor senior and mid-level engineers without becoming a full-time manager. Work directly with product and founders to turn ambiguous business problems into shipped systems, fast. Carry production ownership: instrumentation, on-call, incident response, and postmortems that actually change the system. What We Look For 8+ years building backend systems in production, with clear evidence of increasing scope and technical ownership. A track record at companies known for a high engineering bar: top-tier technology companies, high-growth startups, or equivalently demanding environments where you shipped systems at scale. Deep expertise in at least one modern backend language (Go, Java, Python, Rust, or similar) and strong distributed-systems fundamentals: consistency, queuing, caching, observability. Experience owning architecture for systems serving significant scale (high throughput, large data volumes, or strict latency budgets) and living with the consequences of your decisions. Strong computer science foundations. Many of our engineers come from top CS programs; what matters is that you reason from first principles, not that you memorized a syllabus. Bias for shipping. You have operated in environments where speed mattered and quality was not negotiable, and you know how to hold both. Nice to Have Experience taking a system from single-service to distributed, or from thousands to millions of users. Exposure to ML/AI infrastructure, data-intensive platforms, or event-driven architectures. Prior startup experience at Series A-C stage, or founding-engineer scope at a larger company. #J-18808-Ljbffr