Staff Java Engineer

ABOUT THE ROLE

A technically exceptional Staff Engineer to own our most critical backend systems, set technical

direction, and lead engineers through influence rather than authority — writing code every day, making hard architectural calls, and raising the bar across the team. You'll have real ownership: of the systems, the decisions, and the outcomes.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

Technical Leadership

• Own the most complex backend systems — architecture, design, and execution.

• Drive technical decisions; set the standard for code quality, API design, and reliability.

• Lead design reviews and stay hands-on: write production code, review PRs with depth, prototype when needed.

Team Leadership & Mentorship

• Be the technical anchor — the person engineers come to for guidance, unblocking, and hard calls.

• Mentor at all levels through pairing, design walkthroughs, and code reviews that teach.

• Partner with the EM on hiring: interview candidates and define the technical bar. Architecture &

Delivery

• Lead the technical roadmap; identify the right bets and flag the wrong ones early.

• Drive cross-team alignment; represent your team's systems in broader architecture discussions.

• Champion testing, observability, CI/CD, and reliability. Set SLIs/SLOs; lead postmortems.

• Leverage AI tooling to accelerate delivery — code, testing, docs, and ops.

REQUIREMENTS

General

• 10+ years in software engineering, including meaningful experience as a technical lead or principal engineer.

• Track record of leading through influence — raising quality and velocity without org authority.

• Strong communicator; comfortable with ambiguity and high ownership.

• Experience in startup or high-growth SaaS environments.

Technical Skills

• Expert-level Java and backend API design (Spring Boot or similar).

• Strong database design and query optimization skills, ideally with MySQL.

• Solid grasp of distributed systems, fault tolerance, and scalability patterns.

• Solid DevOps instincts: containers, deployment, monitoring, and reliability.

• Experience with payment systems or high-reliability platforms is a strong plus.

• Experience using AI tools to improve delivery — code, testing, docs, and operations.

OUR STACK

Stack: Java, Spring Boot, MySQL · Docker, Kubernetes, Datadog · Azure Cloud · React