Staff Backend Engineer

Staff Backend Engineer - L6

The Company

Toters is an on-demand e-commerce and delivery platform that enables customers to get anything in their city with the highest level of convenience.

At Toters, technology drives everything we do. Our product teams build features that simplify customers' lives, while our engineers create scalable solutions and optimize internal processes to deliver faster and more cost-effectively. If you thrive in a high-growth startup environment and want to help reshape how people shop across the Middle East, join us.

Description

As a Staff Backend Engineer, you will be responsible for shaping and delivering large-scale, cross-team systems and initiatives that significantly impact product reliability, performance, developer productivity, and business outcomes. You will mentor and grow multiple engineers, drive technical strategy within and across teams, resolve organization-level ambiguity, and proactively raise the bar for engineering excellence.

You combine deep hands-on expertise with strong strategic thinking, owning complex domains end-to-end while influencing roadmaps, architecture standards, and team processes at a broader scale.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead the design, architecture, and delivery of large, cross-system features, platforms, or infrastructure components that span multiple teams and quarters-long timelines.
• Drive technical and architectural decisions for entire domains or product areas, defining long-term strategy, surfacing major trade-offs, and aligning stakeholders across engineering, product, and operations.
• Own end-to-end system health: Establish observability, reliability practices, performance baselines, and incident response patterns that prevent recurring issues across services.
• Mentor and coach engineers, provide career guidance, technical pairing, code/design reviews.
• Identify and eliminate systemic bottlenecks in development velocity, testing, deployment, or onboarding; build shared tools, frameworks, patterns, or automation adopted team-wide or org-wide.
• Champion and evolve engineering standards, best practices, and conventions; influence adoption across multiple teams through clear reasoning, documentation, and leading by example.
• Increase engineering leverage by enabling other teams to move faster and more safely through better architecture, shared abstractions, technical guidance, and reusable patterns."
• Collaborate deeply with product, design, legal, and operations to challenge requirements, refine scopes, assess technical feasibility/risk, and ensure compliance (e.g., privacy, KYC).
• Lead architecture and design discussions at the team-of-teams level; write detailed specs, RFCs, and decision records that enable async alignment and reduce future rework.
• Act as a technical escalation point during major incidents, guiding resolution across domains and preventing recurrence through post-mortems and systemic fixes.

Key Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or equivalent practical experience.
• 8+ years of hands-on software engineering experience, in backend systems at scale (preferably including PHP/Laravel in high-traffic environments).
• Expert-level proficiency in backend development, OOP/SOLID/design patterns, microservices, event-driven architecture, and distributed systems principles.
• Proven track record designing and owning large-scale, performant, reliable backend systems (data modeling, complex schemas, PostgreSQL/MySQL optimization, Redis caching/queuing at scale).
• Deep experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS preferred), containerization, serverless, CI/CD pipelines, observability (monitoring, alerting, tracing), and incident management.
• Strong leadership & influence skills: mentoring multiple engineers, driving cross-team initiatives, resolving ambiguity at org level, and building consensus through clear communication.
• Excellent written & verbal English; ability to write precise technical documents, RFCs, and give constructive feedback across seniority levels.
• Demonstrated impact on business/product metrics through technical leadership (e.g., reduced latency, improved uptime, accelerated delivery velocity).

Nice to Have

• Experience leading migrations, platform builds, or reliability programs in high-traffic e-commerce/delivery marketplaces.
• Familiarity with advanced scaling techniques (sharding, eventual consistency, CQRS, etc.).
• Prior work ensuring regulatory compliance (KYC, privacy, data protection) in collaboration with non-technical teams.

Benefits

• Competitive compensation.
• Discounts on Toters orders.
• First-class medical insurance.