Staff Software Engineer - Backend

Responsibilities

• Provide technical leadership for scalable media and AI content pipelines.
• Design and ship systems for media processing, AI-generated audio and video assets, captions, localization, publishing, and quality control.
• Shape platform architecture and make explicit short- and long-term technical trade-offs.
• Deliver large projects and maintain key code repositories.
• Break down complex problems, resolve incident root causes, and improve maintainability, availability, and performance.
• Roadmap and execute technical strategies with cross-functional teams.
• Mentor engineers through code reviews, pairing, and technical guidance.
• Integrate AI technologies into workflows and product features.
• Improve developer tooling, observability, reliability, and operational practices.
• Communicate technical ideas and document solutions.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field.
• 10+ years of non-internship, full-time professional software development experience.
• 4+ years of experience with at least one programming language.
• 4+ years of full software development life cycle experience.
• 3+ years of experience with React JS and Node.js/TypeScript.
• Experience mentoring and leading junior team members and contributing to planning and decision-making.
• Experience delivering large production software projects or features.
• Proficiency in a modern programming language such as Python, Java, or JavaScript.

Nice-to-haves

• Platform-as-a-product mindset and developer experience practices.
• Backend and distributed-systems fundamentals, including latency, throughput, availability, capacity, backpressure, consistency, and resilience.
• Production integration of large language models or generative AI services, including evaluations, validation, observability, and failure handling.
• SLOs, SLAs, error budgets, service-health metrics, alerting, on-call practices, incident response, and root-cause analysis.
• Metrics, structured logs, traces, dashboards, actionable alerts, cache design, database performance, query and index tuning, connection pools, and capacity management.
• Headless CMS integrations, webhooks, vendor adapters, content delivery networks, or publishing pipelines.
• Durable workflow orchestration systems such as Temporal.
• Media processing with FFmpeg, adaptive bitrate video, text-to-speech, speech-to-text, or WebVTT captions.
• Event streaming with Kafka and CI/CD automation with GitHub Actions.
• Healthcare, privacy-sensitive, regulated, or high-trust environments.
• Mentoring senior engineers or serving as a technical lead for a platform, migration, or cross-functional launch.

Compensation & Benefits

• Group Medical Coverage, Group Term Life Insurance, and Group Personal Accident Insurance.
• Lifestyle stipend and learning and development opportunities.
• Discounted company stock through an employee stock purchase plan.
• Hybrid schedule requiring three days per week in the office (Monday through Wednesday).