Staff Backend Engineer

Staff Backend Engineer

Location: New York City, NY

Work Arrangement: Onsite

Employment Type: Full-Time

Level: Staff Engineer

About the Role

We are looking for an exceptional Staff Backend Engineer to help define the architecture, technical direction, and engineering standards of our backend platform.

This is a high-impact technical leadership role for an engineer who combines deep backend expertise with strong systems thinking and the ability to influence engineering decisions across teams.

You will remain highly hands-on while owning some of the company's most complex technical challenges and helping other engineers operate at a higher level.

What You’ll Do

• Lead the architecture and development of large-scale, highly reliable backend systems .
• Own complex technical initiatives spanning multiple services, teams, and product areas.
• Define scalable architectures, technical standards, and engineering best practices.
• Make critical decisions around APIs, databases, distributed systems, infrastructure, performance, and reliability.
• Identify architectural bottlenecks and proactively improve system scalability and resilience.
• Lead projects from ambiguous problem definition through architecture, implementation, deployment, and long-term operation.
• Write production-quality code and remain deeply involved in implementation and technical problem-solving.
• Establish best practices around testing, observability, reliability, security, and deployment.
• Partner with engineering leadership and product teams on long-term technical strategy.
• Mentor senior engineers and provide technical guidance across the organization.
• Drive technical alignment across teams without relying solely on formal authority.
• Lead incident investigations and develop strategies to prevent recurring production issues.
• Evaluate emerging technologies and determine where they can provide meaningful technical or business value.

Required Qualifications

• 5-8 years of professional software engineering experience , with substantial backend and systems experience.
• Proven experience designing and operating large-scale production backend systems .
• Expert-level proficiency in one or more backend programming languages such as Go, Java, Python, C++, or Node.js .
• Deep understanding of distributed systems, databases, networking, APIs, concurrency, and system architecture .
• Experience designing systems for high availability, reliability, performance, and scale.
• Strong experience with cloud platforms such as AWS, GCP, or Azure .
• Strong understanding of microservices, event-driven architectures, queues, caching, and service-to-service communication.
• Experience with production infrastructure, CI/CD, observability, monitoring, and incident response.
• Demonstrated ability to lead technically complex projects involving multiple engineers or teams.
• Excellent technical communication and ability to influence engineering decisions across an organization.
• Ability to work onsite in New York City .

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience operating systems at significant scale.
• Deep experience with technologies such as Kubernetes, Kafka, Redis, PostgreSQL, gRPC, or similar infrastructure .
• Experience with high-throughput or low-latency systems.
• Experience building platforms or infrastructure used by multiple engineering teams.
• Experience in AI/ML infrastructure, data-intensive systems, or real-time systems.
• Experience at a high-growth startup or technology company.
• Strong open-source contributions or demonstrated technical leadership outside of day-to-day responsibilities.

What We’re Looking For

A Staff Engineer should be more than an excellent coder. You should be someone who can look across an entire technical ecosystem, identify the highest-leverage problems, and drive solutions that improve the organization as a whole.

You are comfortable operating in ambiguity, challenging existing architectural assumptions, and making decisions that balance performance, reliability, scalability, engineering velocity, and business priorities .

You lead through technical expertise and influence rather than title, while remaining hands-on enough to understand the systems you own at a deep level.

This is an onsite Staff Engineering role based in New York City.