Staff Backend Engineer

Who you are

• 12+ years designing, building, and operating backend or platform systems at scale, with a strong programming background in Go, Python, or similar (Kotlin/Swift a plus)
• Deep experience owning architecture for complex distributed systems (scalability, failure modes, operational maturity) and making high-impact architectural and investment tradeoffs that set technical direction for a broad domain, not just executing a roadmap
• Ability to independently translate ambiguous technical and product goals into robust designs with clear technical and operational tradeoffs
• Strong developer platform and internal tooling background (test/CI infrastructure, distributed backend systems), including designing APIs, SDKs, and shared services with clear boundaries for multiple teams, and building reusable libraries, templates, and paved-road abstractions across heterogeneous repos and toolchains
• Hands-on experience with AI-assisted development tools (e.g., GitHub Copilot, Claude Code) and a track record of using them to improve velocity, quality, or developer experience
• Proven experience shipping production agents and tuning coding-harness workflows across planning, execution, verification, and failure recovery
• Experience designing evaluations for production agents, including deterministic checks, LLM-based judges, regression benchmarks, and end-to-end testing suites
• Commitment to engineering excellence and systems thinking: reliability, observability, incident management, reproducibility, versioning, execution safety, and enforcing acceptance criteria before changes ship
• Demonstrated influence beyond direct ownership, including mentoring senior engineers and setting standards for system design and quality
• Strong experience with AWS and cloud-native systems; experience with AgentCore is a significant plus
• Experience with agentic and LLM-assisted development workflows: agent frameworks, tool and prompt orchestration, and evaluation harnesses for model and agent output
• Experience building or scaling an internal developer platform, developer experience, or platform engineering capability, including through periods of rapid company growth
• Experience curating internal marketplaces, reusable component libraries, or golden-path ecosystems with quality and lifecycle governance
• Experience with contract testing, integration test infrastructure, and telemetry/measurement systems for engineering effectiveness, developer productivity, and code quality
• Familiarity with the backend infrastructure that powers mobile (iOS and Android), ML, and web experiences
• Prior Staff or Principal-level experience driving architectural direction across teams, platforms, or product domains
• ML engineering experience, particularly applied to agent evaluation, model behavior, or production AI systems, is a plus

What the job involves

• Fetch is building the most rewarding way to shop, and how fast and reliably our engineers ship is a big part of how we get there
• We invest heavily in the tools, standards, and infrastructure that help engineers deliver reliable software faster across backend, mobile, ML, and web, including modernizing our developer workflows with AI-assisted development
• We're hiring a Staff Backend Engineer to design and build the systems behind that developer experience
• You'll own architecture across developer tooling, test infrastructure, and engineering workflows, and you'll be hands-on building the SDKs, reusable components, and shared platforms that raise engineering velocity and quality across the company
• This is a senior technical role focused on system design and execution, not people management, but it carries broad influence: you'll set architectural direction, define standards, and mentor engineers across multiple teams
• This is a high-impact role at the intersection of developer platforms, engineering infrastructure, and operational excellence, where scalability, reliability, and quality are non-negotiable
• This is a full-time role that can be held from one of our US offices or remotely in the United States
• Design and build the tools, golden paths, SDKs, and evaluation frameworks that improve how engineers deliver high-quality software, including AI-assisted development workflows
• Architect core building blocks such as cross-platform contract testing, integration test infrastructure, and unified components that make development reliable across backend, mobile, and data
• Build observability and governance for developer tooling, including telemetry and metrics that give visibility into developer productivity, code quality, and platform health
• Design and evolve internal libraries and marketplaces of reusable templates and components, with quality gates, versioning, and lifecycle governance that sustain adoption at scale
• Evaluate and integrate emerging developer tools, including AI-assisted development tools, and turn the promising ones into production-grade platform capabilities
• Lead architectural decisions across multiple services and domains, balancing reliability, developer velocity, maintainability, and operational cost as the platform grows
• Improve engineering leverage by identifying opportunities for platformization, reusable services, and shared infrastructure that accelerate development across multiple teams
• Partner across Engineering, Product, and Data to define platform capabilities, evaluate technical tradeoffs, and align technical investments with measurable adoption and quality outcomes
• Raise the bar on engineering standards, systems-level thinking, and operational excellence, helping teams shift from feature-delivery to system-creation
• Influence org-level technical priorities and investment, partnering with engineering and product leadership to sequence multi-quarter platform bets and set technical direction across the org, not just execute a roadmap
• Mentor senior engineers and set standards for design, reliability, and maintainability, driving influence well beyond your direct areas of ownership

Benefits

• Equity: Hop on the rocketship and have your own stake in Fetch's success with generous equity.
• 401k Match: Fetch matches 100% of the first 4% of your 401(k) contribution.
• People Benefits: Enjoy a competitive suite of ebenfits to promote health for you and your family,. Medical, Dental, and Vision insurance. Flexible Spending Accounts & Health Savings Account, with automatic employer HSA contributions per pay period. Family forming benefit with $10k lifetime stipend.
• Pet Benefits: We know your furry friends are family, too. Pet insurance is fully covered for your first pet.
• Continuing Education: Fetch provides $10,000+/year in education reimbursement support for job-related courses or programs.
• Flexible Paid Time Off: At Fetch, you'll plan your time off as you see fit with our flexible PTO policy. On top of our flexible PTO, Fetch observes 9 paid holidays as well as a year-end-week-long break.
• Robust Leave Policies: Fetch offers generous leave time for health and personal needs, including 20 weeks of parental leave for primary caregivers and 14 weeks for secondary caregivers + $2,000 incentive to assist employees with covering the cost of childcare, clothing, diapers and much more!
• Flexible Work Environment: Experience our beautiful work spaces, or get things done from the comfort of your couch. Choose what's best for each day.