Staff Software Engineer — Tech Lead, Backend

Conviva is the experience analytics platform for AI agents, apps, and streaming. Conviva pioneered quality of experience measurement for streaming video and has supported live digital experiences across 20 Super Bowls, 10 Olympic Games, and five FIFA World Cup tournaments. With full-census, real-time, stateful analytics, Conviva shows what consumers actually experience, not just whether systems are running, and connects that experience to revenue, retention, and risk.

We are looking for a Tech Lead who leads through technical excellence, not management authority. You will define backend architecture, elevate the engineering team in Beijing, and drive Conviva's AI-native platform evolution. 

Join us at the frontier of the agent analytics revolution, where we are defining the future of AI-native platforms. We offer a high-impact role where strategy meets technical craft, empowering you to shape our architecture while leveraging an AI-first development culture. This is a rare opportunity to join a team that prioritizes building and moving fast, backed by competitive compensation, equity, and comprehensive benefits.

What Success Looks Like

• Own architecture for Conviva's high-scale, real-time data platform.
• Lead design reviews and drive key decisions on distributed systems, OLAP, and streaming infrastructure (ClickHouse, Kafka, Druid).
• This role operates in an AI-assisted engineering environment. We expect active, fluent use of AI coding and agentic tools as part of normal engineering workflow - not as a productivity bonus, but as a baseline. Use AI coding tools (e.g., Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot) as a standard part of your workflow - for prototyping, code review acceleration, design exploration, and technical documentation. 
• Integrate AI/agentic capabilities: LLM pipelines, agent observability, intelligent data modeling.
• Mentor engineers through code reviews, design pairing, and knowledge sharing.
• Set the technical bar-your code, architecture decisions, and engineering habits are what others build toward.
• Identify and grow future tech leads; champion code quality, testing, and CI/CD discipline.
• Partner with Product and cross-regional engineering teams to translate business needs into scalable solutions.
• Drive end-to-end delivery: design → development → testing → production monitoring.
• Communicate technical tradeoffs clearly to senior stakeholders in English.

Who You Are

• BS in Computer Science or equivalent; MS/PhD a plus.
• 8+ years of software engineering, with 5+ years in data platforms or high-scale backend systems.
• Hands-on experience with big data platform stacks, including but not limited to Spark, ClickHouse, Druid, and Kafka.
• Demonstrated understanding and practical experience with AI Agent systems, including LLM pipelines, agent observability, or intelligent data modeling.
• Leads through technical influence-trusted for solving hard problems, not for holding a title.
• Track record of mentoring engineers and making them measurably more competitive.
• Proficient in either of the programming languages: Python, Go, Java, Scala, or Rust.
• Actively uses AI coding tools (Cursor, Claude Code, GitHub Copilot) in daily engineering work.
• Thrives in ambiguity; communicates clearly across distributed teams in multiple time zones.
• Excellent English communication skills, both verbal and written.

Bonus Points

• Experience with LLM application backends, agentic systems, RAG, or LLM-ops tooling.
• Familiarity with agent frameworks (LangChain, LangGraph, CrewAI) and production deployment patterns.

Learn more at conviva.ai and follow the company on LinkedIn and YouTube.