Staff Backend Engineer

The Staff Backend Engineer is a senior technical leader responsible for the long-term health and direction of our backend services. You will operate with a high degree of autonomy to identify and solve our most critical technical challenges, often in areas that are loosely defined or cross multiple domains. Unlike a Senior Engineer who masters a specific domain, you will provide the technical vision and architectural guardrails for several domains. You will be a go-to expert for other engineers, leading by example with exceptional code, robust system design, and strategic thinking that anticipates future business needs.

Key Responsibilities & Deliverables:

• Lead the design, development, and evolution of large-scale, high-traffic systems or company initiatives, often across multiple teams

• Define the long-term technical roadmap and architectural vision for key areas of our platform, and articulate the return on investment (ROI) to engineering leaders and other departments

• Decompose complex business and system problems into clear, scalable, and elegant technical designs

• Act as a technical lead on cross-team projects, ensuring that architectural principles and quality standards are met

• Mentor senior engineers, providing deep technical guidance and fostering their growth into future technical leaders

• Represent engineering in cross-functional discussions

• Drive innovation by prototyping and championing the adoption of new technologies and methodologies, including the strategic use of LLMs and AI-driven development practices

• Work on foundational infrastructure and application platforms that enable other engineering teams to build sustainable products with long-term vision

Key Skills:

Essential:

• Expert-level proficiency in Java and related frameworks and libraries

• Deep knowledge of middleware services & frameworks (such as relational databases, NoSQL databases, messaging systems, etc.) and nuanced understanding of their internals

• Demonstrated experience designing, building, and operating complex, distributed systems at scale

• Mastery of architectural patterns, domain-driven design, and data modeling for complex systems

• Proven ability to influence and lead large, complex technical projects without formal authority<