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 Platform Engineer based in the United States.
As a Staff Backend Platform Engineer, you will play a critical role in shaping the architecture and technical direction of a next-generation AI platform. This is a highly influential individual contributor position with broad ownership across backend systems, integrations, data infrastructure, messaging services, and orchestration frameworks. You will collaborate with engineering, product, and AI teams to design scalable, reliable, and high-performance platform capabilities that support advanced AI-driven experiences. The role combines strategic technical leadership with hands-on software development, offering the opportunity to drive organization-wide engineering standards while building production-grade systems. Working in a remote-first environment, you will help create the foundational infrastructure that enables innovation, operational excellence, and long-term platform growth.
Accountabilities
- Define and drive the technical vision for backend platform architecture, influencing integrations, messaging infrastructure, data systems, and orchestration services across multiple engineering teams.
- Lead complex cross-functional initiatives, partnering with product, AI, and engineering stakeholders to deliver scalable platform capabilities and align technical roadmaps with business objectives.
- Establish and evolve engineering best practices for backend service development, data modeling, observability, reliability, performance, and operational excellence.
- Design and enhance integration frameworks supporting APIs, webhooks, data ingestion pipelines, synchronization services, and resilient processing of external system interactions.
- Build and maintain messaging infrastructure for email, SMS, and chat delivery, ensuring scalability, auditability, throughput optimization, and system reliability.
- Develop and optimize platform services, workflow orchestration mechanisms, event-driven architectures, and backend systems that support AI-powered products.
- Identify and mitigate platform-wide risks related to scalability, reliability, performance, and maintainability while driving continuous improvement initiatives.
- Mentor engineers through technical reviews, architecture guidance, and collaborative problem-solving, helping elevate engineering standards across the organization.
- Contribute directly to production code development while providing technical leadership on critical backend initiatives and long-term platform evolution.
Requirements
- 8+ years of professional software engineering experience with significant expertise in backend platforms, integrations, distributed systems, or data infrastructure operating at production scale.
- Proven success leading large technical initiatives across teams, including architecture design, stakeholder alignment, execution, and delivery.
- Strong proficiency in Python and extensive experience building production services using frameworks such as FastAPI, Celery, or similar asynchronous processing technologies.
- Deep knowledge of PostgreSQL, including schema design, performance tuning, query optimization, and operational management in production environments.
- Experience designing and maintaining large-scale data pipelines and working with complex datasets across multiple source systems.
- Demonstrated ability to establish engineering standards and influence technical direction across an organization.
- Expertise integrating with third-party SaaS platforms and managing challenges such as rate limits, schema evolution, retries, and partial system failures.
- Strong background in modern cloud-native architectures, particularly within AWS environments.
- Experience leveraging modern AI-assisted development tools as part of an efficient engineering workflow.
- Excellent communication, collaboration, mentoring, and technical leadership skills.
- Preferred experience includes B2B SaaS environments, messaging platforms, infrastructure-as-code tools, Kubernetes ecosystems, observability platforms, event-driven systems, and AI-oriented backend platforms.
Benefits
- Competitive compensation aligned with experience, skills, role scope, and geographic market considerations.
- Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision insurance coverage.
- Generous paid time off and company-recognized holidays.
- 401(k) retirement savings plan.
- Equity participation opportunities.
- Fully remote-first work environment with flexibility and autonomy.
- Opportunity to influence the technical direction of a cutting-edge AI platform.
- Collaborative culture with experienced engineering professionals and cross-functional teams.
- Exposure to innovative technologies and large-scale backend engineering challenges.
- Strong focus on professional growth, technical leadership, and long-term career development.