Staff Software Engineer, Shared Services ⭐

Join our Framework team: the engineering foundation that makes Achievers scale.

This team owns authentication, API gateways, interservice communication, caching, feature flag management, and the base libraries that every Go and Python service at Achievers is built on - all sitting at the critical path of everything we ship.

Your work here has a multiplier effect.

The libraries, platforms, and tooling you build are used by roughly 100 engineers across the company.

When you raise the floor - better DX, faster onboarding, more consistent patterns, AI-first tooling - the whole engineering organization moves faster.

Please note that this is a back-end focused role. Successful candidates will be able to bring a strong backend engineering background and be excited about continuing to deepen their expertise in backend and platform development. At this time, this role is not intended as a transition role for engineers whose primary experience and career interests are front-end-focused.

Why you'll love this role:

What makes this team unique is the breadth of its perspective.

• Framework is the one team that holds end-to-end understanding of how base libraries must interact with the infrastructure layer and the CI/CD pipeline.
• That bird's-eye view of the platform means this team is where platform-wide challenges land - and where the solutions that unblock everyone else originate.

Right now, the team is in the middle of some of the most technically interesting work in the company: modernizing our authentication and API gateway architecture.

• These are high-stakes architectural shifts that require both deep technical judgement and the ability to drive alignment across teams.
• If you're energized by building for builders - designing systems that are secure, highly available, and genuinely pleasant to work with - and you want your architectural decisions to have company-wide reach, this is the team.

How you’ll shape our software engineering practices:

• Provide guidance and mentorship to a team of software developers with varying experience levels, fostering an environment of continuous learning and improvement.
• Design, build, and maintain innovative product features that enhance the Achievers platform.
• Work closely with product managers, designers, and other engineering teams to define requirements and translate them into technical solutions. Actively participate in cross-functional planning sessions to align on priorities and dependencies.
• Be hands-on with the codebase, actively engaging in code reviews and ensuring best practices are followed.
• Utilize a wide range of modern tools and technologies, including Python, Go, Kubernetes, Docker, Drone, Google PubSub, GraphQL, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Microservices, to solve complex challenges.
• Architect high-performance, highly available, and secure software solutions that scale to millions of users.
• Ship code regularly-multiple times a day, enabling continuous improvement and rapid delivery of new features.
• Take full ownership of features or modules from design through deployment, ensuring the quality and reliability of the codebase.
• Monitor application performance and optimize code to ensure it meets scaling, performance, and security requirements as the product grows.
• Contribute to and enforce engineering best practices, standards, and guidelines for coding, testing, and infrastructure across the team. Lead and initiate engineering improvements, whether it’s through tooling, processes, or adopting new technologies, to ensure the team is working effectively.
• Ensure that systems, designs, and decisions are well-documented, making it easier for other engineers to understand, maintain, and expand upon your work.
• Continuously learn and stay up-to-date with industry trends, emerging technologies, and software engineering practices to bring fresh perspectives and ideas to the team.
• Guide junior engineers not only on technical solutions but also on career development, helping them set goals, identify growth areas, and improve their soft skills.

Experience we feel will set you up for success:

• 8+ years of relevant back-end software development experience leading projects and especially system design, with at least 3 of them in a Senior/Staff capacity.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills
• Strong programming skills in Python or Go are highly advantageous.
• Comfortable working in a UNIX/Linux environment
• Experience with Docker and Kubernetes.
• Strong understanding of microservices architecture.
• Experience with distributed systems.
• Experience with API gateway design, gRPC, and service-to-service communication patterns
• Experience designing authentication and authorization systems (OAuth2, OIDC, PKCE, JWT)
• Ability to analyze business requirements and create technical design documents aligned with architecture standards
• Passion for performance profiling and benchmarking.
• Experience executing large-scale migrations with zero downtime in production systems
• Track record of building shared libraries or SDKs used across large engineering organizations
• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science or a related field
• Experience working in Agile teams