Staff Backend Engineer

This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Staff Backend Engineer based in United States.

This is a hands-on technical leadership role focused on building and evolving backend systems that support millions of daily users and thousands of organizations.

You will design scalable APIs, services, event-driven workflows, data models, and integrations across a modern distributed technology environment.

The role combines deep engineering execution with technical leadership, allowing you to guide complex initiatives from discovery through production.

You will tackle challenging reliability, performance, observability, and production-debugging problems across the broader system.

Working closely with Product, Design, Infrastructure, Platform, Data, and Support teams, you will turn business needs into durable technical solutions.

You will also mentor engineers, influence architectural decisions, and raise engineering standards through strong technical judgment and collaboration.

This opportunity is well suited to a senior backend engineer who enjoys solving ambiguous problems in a highly distributed, remote-first environment.

Accountabilities:

• Architect, build, and evolve scalable backend APIs, services, event-driven workflows, queues, background jobs, data models, caching strategies, and integrations.
• Own complex backend initiatives end-to-end, from discovery and technical design through implementation, rollout, production support, and long-term maintenance.
• Lead ambiguous technical projects by breaking down complex problems, identifying risks, evaluating trade-offs, and establishing practical paths toward execution.
• Improve system reliability, scalability, performance, and operational maturity through architecture improvements, testing, database optimization, caching, monitoring, alerting, and incident follow-up.
• Investigate and resolve complex production issues across application code, databases, caches, queues, background jobs, observability data, and request lifecycles.
• Collaborate with Product, Design, Engineering, Infrastructure, Platform, Data, Support, and other stakeholders to translate roadmap requirements into durable backend solutions.
• Contribute to service-oriented and event-driven architecture while helping shape the technical foundation supporting a large-scale product ecosystem.
• Provide technical leadership through influence, mentoring, constructive feedback, and clear communication of technical decisions and trade-offs.
• Connect backend engineering decisions to customer outcomes, business priorities, reliability, and long-term maintainability.
• Help raise the overall quality bar through effective engineering practices, production ownership, documentation, testing, and continuous improvement.

Requirements:

• Strong expertise in Node.js and proven experience building and operating production-grade backend systems.
• Staff-level backend engineering experience with a strong track record developing high-scale APIs, services, distributed systems, or shared product capabilities.
• Strong command of backend technologies such as Node.js, TypeScript, Elixir, Ruby/Rails, Java, Go, Python, or comparable technologies, including runtime behavior, failure modes, and production trade-offs.
• Advanced SQL and relational database knowledge, including indexing, query optimization, migrations, profiling, data modeling, transactions, read/write patterns, and performance tuning.
• Practical understanding of service-oriented and event-driven architectures, queues, background jobs, webhooks, Redis or similar caching technologies, and systems operating under significant production load.
• Working knowledge of infrastructure and platform concepts, including deployments, containers, CI/CD, cloud services, networking fundamentals, observability, and operational debugging.
• Strong production ownership mindset with the ability to use logs, metrics, traces, dashboards, alerts, and incident reviews to improve system reliability.
• Demonstrated ability to lead through influence, mentor engineers, facilitate technical decisions, and communicate complex technical concepts to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Strong interpersonal and collaboration skills, including the ability to give and receive constructive feedback and work effectively across distributed teams.
• Bonus experience working closely with infrastructure, platform, SRE, DevOps, or data teams.
• Familiarity with Elasticsearch, BigQuery, analytics pipelines, search infrastructure, reporting workflows, or high-volume data processing is a plus.
• Experience responsibly using AI-assisted engineering tools for debugging, testing, documentation, refactoring, prototyping, or developer productivity is advantageous.
• Ability to work effectively in a fully remote environment across different time zones.
• Candidates must be permanent residents of the United States; hiring is currently unavailable in certain U.S. states.

Benefits:

• Minimum starting compensation of $200,000 annually, inclusive of base salary and bonus, with final compensation adjusted based on experience, skills, certifications, and geographic location.
• Fully remote, remote-first work environment.
• Unlimited paid time off.
• Paid parental leave for all parents.
• 100% premium coverage for medical, dental, and vision insurance for employees and their families.
• 401(k) retirement plan.
• $1,500 annual learning and development stipend.
• Generous home office allowance.
• Monthly health and wellness stipend reimbursement.
• Company-wide meetings and team events in fun locations.
• Company merchandise upon joining plus an annual work-anniversary credit.
• Opportunities for professional growth, technical leadership, and meaningful impact.
• Inclusive, collaborative culture focused on trust, accountability, and continuous development.