Staff Backend Engineer - Phone Billing
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 - Phone Billing based in India.
This is a senior technical leadership role responsible for shaping the architecture and evolution of a high-scale phone billing platform.
You will work at the intersection of distributed systems, communications infrastructure, product usage, and revenue-critical workflows.
The platform processes more than 100 million events daily across multiple services, making correctness, reliability, and scalability essential.
You will solve complex challenges involving usage metering, rating, charging, reconciliation, idempotency, credits, refunds, and provider costs.
The role combines hands-on engineering with architectural ownership and influence across multiple technical and business functions.
You will help build systems capable of supporting significant future growth while maintaining strong financial accuracy, observability, and resilience.
Working in a remote-first global environment, you will also mentor senior engineers and influence engineering standards, strategy, and operational excellence.
Accountabilities
Own the end-to-end technical health of the phone billing platform, identifying architectural bottlenecks, reliability risks, correctness issues, technical debt, and opportunities for improved scalability and cost efficiency.
Define and execute a technical roadmap focused on billing accuracy, reconciliation, observability, resilience, scalability, and operational performance.
Lead high-impact initiatives from problem definition and technical discovery through architecture, implementation, rollout, and measurement.
Own the architecture and scaling strategy for core communication platform components, including CPaaS abstractions, provider adapters, and shared messaging and voice APIs.
Design and evolve usage metering, rating, reserve/commit workflows, idempotency, reconciliation, audit trails, and billing lifecycle processes while preventing duplicate charging or lost usage.
Drive the evolution of revenue and billing capabilities toward configuration-driven, rules-based architectures that can adapt to changing regulatory, carrier, and pricing requirements.
Design and implement high-concurrency systems that improve reliability, latency, throughput, and performance across time-sensitive APIs and workflows.
Work hands-on with technologies such as NestJS, Firestore, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, Redis, queuing systems, data warehousing platforms, and service-mesh-based microservices.
Strengthen observability, monitoring, alerting, and incident-response practices using tools such as Prometheus and Grafana, including monitoring of critical financial invariants alongside technical health indicators.
Use AI and LLM-based development tools to accelerate coding, refactoring, testing, and debugging while establishing appropriate safeguards and validation practices.
Partner with Product, Infrastructure, Security, Finance, Legal, and external stakeholders to maintain data integrity, access controls, compliance, and reliable phone-service operations.
Mentor Engineering Managers, senior engineers, and technical leaders while contributing to leadership development, succession planning, and high engineering standards.
Participate in architecture reviews, technical deep dives, incident response, and on-call rotations while promoting operational accountability and continuous improvement.
8+ years of backend engineering experience, including 2+ years in a Staff-level or comparable technical leadership role.
Proven experience designing and operating fault-tolerant distributed systems at very high scale, including environments processing billions of requests or events.
Deep expertise in distributed systems, event-driven architectures, asynchronous processing, and highly concurrent backend services.
Demonstrated experience building systems where correctness is critical, such as billing, payments, ledgers, metering, or other transactional domains.
Strong understanding of idempotency, exactly-once business semantics, reconciliation, transactional consistency, and failure handling.
Proven ability to improve system availability, performance, reliability, throughput, and operational resilience under production load.
Strong experience with both relational and NoSQL data models, particularly for complex transactional workloads.
Experience designing configurable, policy-driven, or rules-based systems that can evolve without extensive hard-coded changes.
Familiarity with production monitoring, SLOs, observability, incident management, and root-cause analysis.
Understanding of AI-assisted software development and techniques for mitigating LLM hallucinations through testing, constraints, contextual grounding, and validation.
Excellent communication and cross-functional collaboration skills, including the ability to work effectively with Finance, Legal, Product, Infrastructure, Security, and external partners.
Pragmatic, hands-on technical leadership style with the ability to balance long-term architecture with iterative execution.
Experience with usage-based billing or metering engines processing millions of transactional events per hour is highly valued.
Exposure to telecommunications trust, compliance, and carrier requirements such as 10DLC, toll-free verification, TCPA/TSR, DLT, carrier filtering, or number portability is advantageous.
Experience building provider-agnostic integration layers across multiple third-party vendors is a plus.
Familiarity with communication APIs such as Twilio or Plivo and modern AI development tools is beneficial.
Contributions to open-source projects, internal engineering platforms, or technical publications are valued.
Remote position based in India.
Opportunity to work on highly scalable, revenue-critical distributed systems operating at significant event volumes.
Significant architectural ownership and influence across communication, billing, infrastructure, and revenue-related systems.
Hands-on exposure to modern backend technologies, microservices, event-driven architectures, cloud-scale data systems, and AI-assisted engineering.
Opportunity to solve complex technical challenges involving billing accuracy, financial reconciliation, resilience, observability, and high concurrency.
Global, remote-first working environment with collaboration across engineering and business functions.
Leadership and mentoring opportunities, including developing senior engineers and technical leaders.
Opportunity to influence engineering standards, architecture, technical strategy, and long-term platform evolution.
Participation in high-impact initiatives supporting substantial future growth of a large-scale communications platform.
Equal opportunity work environment with a focus on skills, performance, and professional development.