# Software Engineer (Backend), Deliverability

**Company:** [Front](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/front)
**Location:** San Francisco, CA
**Role:** Backend Engineering
**Salary:** $178k – $204k/yr
**Experience:** 5+ years
**Skills:** Backend Development, Distributed Systems, JavaScript, TypeScript, Python, Ruby, AWS, Kafka, Email Infrastructure, DNS
**Posted:** 2026-07-14

> Technical lead on the Deliverability team owning high-volume email infrastructure, ingestion, routing, and outbound delivery systems that process millions of events. Requires 5+ years building scalable distributed backend systems with strong ownership of architecture, reliability, and on-call duties.

## Job Description

## Responsibilities
- Serve as a technical lead on the Deliverability team, driving the architecture and execution of major infrastructure and product projects.
- Own and improve high-volume email infrastructure and decisioning systems spanning ingestion, routing, and outbound delivery, driving deliverability outcomes at scale.
- Own key services that power Front and lead architectural evolutions to build for reliability and scale.
- Collaborate with other systems and infrastructure teams to build upon next-generation architecture.
- Collaborate closely with product managers, product designers and other engineers to conceptualize, build, and test new product features.

## Requirements
- 5+ years of professional software engineering experience.
- Strong experience building and operating high-scale, distributed backend systems.
- Comfort owning complex systems and making architectural decisions with real production impact.
- A collaborative, low-ego approach to engineering and cross-team partnerships.
- Experience with on-call responsibilities and a strong sense of ownership over system reliability.
- Product mindset, building scalable and extensible solutions that meet customer requirements.
- Fluency in a dynamic language like Javascript (Typescript), Python, Ruby, or similar.
- Strong track record of launching and delivering projects of significant complexity and high level of ambiguity.
- Experience architecting, deploying and operating asynchronous work queues, high-volume storage systems, or high-throughput systems.
- Understand the trade-offs in employing different engineering solutions to a problem, valuing pragmatism over idealism.
- Ability to thrive in a dynamic, fast-paced, collaborative, and high-growth environment.

## Nice-to-Haves
- Prior experience at a B2B SaaS or customer communications company.
- Familiarity with email sending at high volume (millions of messages/day).
- Experience with DNS infrastructure.
- Experience working on software systems built on Amazon Web Services.
- Deep knowledge of the email stack and assorted RFCs.
- Experience with anti-spam infrastructure to prevent bad actors from exploiting an email service.
- Built deep integrations with an email delivery service like SendGrid, MailGun, Mandrill or SparkPost.
- Experience with Gmail or Office 365 APIs.
- Experience with Kafka.

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