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Staff Software Engineer, Core Architecture
Job Summary
Join a small, senior team tackling the toughest technical challenges in a high-growth platform. As a hands-on Staff Engineer, you will design, build, and ship production code in critical system areas while providing architectural leadership across teams. This role demands deep expertise in complex codebases, production debugging, and end-to-end ownership of high-risk initiatives that drive platform scale and innovation.
Essential Functions
- Design, implement, and maintain core backend systems foundational to the platform
- Write production code in high-impact areas including services, shared libraries, infrastructure, and tooling
- Define security boundaries for autonomous agents with user identity propagation and sandboxing
- Lead execution of technically complex projects from design through rollout and iteration
- Debug and resolve production issues involving scale, data consistency, performance, and reliability
- Drive architectural decisions through prototypes, code, and real implementations
- Establish patterns for service boundaries, APIs, data ownership, and distributed systems
- Mentor senior engineers, conduct deep code reviews, and influence engineering direction
Required Qualifications
- 8+ years of professional software engineering experience at high-growth startups or large-scale platforms
- Demonstrated experience leading architectural design for large, distributed systems
- Experience breaking down monoliths into service-oriented architectures or microservices
- Deep expertise in scaling backend systems to handle high throughput and complexity
- Strong full-stack engineering skills with backend focus
- Experience decomposing monoliths, building microservices, and database migrations
- Strong product mindset with experience building systems from the ground up
- Effective communicator able to articulate complex technical concepts clearly
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience designing and building authentication and authorization systems
- Background building developer tooling, especially for AI/ML applications
- Work at high-scale startups or tier-1 VC-backed companies on ground-up systems
- Proficiency in languages like Java, Go, Kotlin, or Python
- History of pragmatic trade-offs balancing velocity, quality, and maintainability
Technical Skills
- Backend development (Node.js, Java, Go, Kotlin, Python)
- Distributed systems scaling and high-throughput architecture
- Monolith decomposition to microservices
- Authentication and authorization systems
- Database migrations and data consistency
- Production debugging at scale
- Developer tooling and AI/ML integration
- Typescript
- React, Next.js, Vue (frontend)
- MongoDB
Compensation & Benefits
Competitive base salary in the range of $240,000 - $250,000 annually, depending on experience. Comprehensive benefits package for direct hire position.