Staff Backend Engineer - Trust & Control Safety Systems

Responsibilities

• Redesign and optimize data models, queries, and indexing strategies across MongoDB, Firestore, and Elasticsearch.
• Own Elasticsearch reliability, including ingestion, indexing, shard strategy, and query performance for billions of documents.
• Eliminate bottlenecks, improve replication health, and enforce predictable query and index latency.
• Define data flows and integration boundaries between storage, cache, and APIs with clear contracts and fault isolation.
• Build observability across data paths, including metrics, traces, slow-query logs, replication lag, and cluster-health dashboards.
• Enforce unit, integration, and load-testing standards across backend modules.
• Drive RFCs, ADRs, and design reviews; codify repeatable engineering patterns.
• Write code, design systems, and debug production issues as a hands-on technical leader.
• Mentor engineers and influence architecture across teams.

Requirements

• 8+ years of experience building high-scale, mission-critical backend systems.
• Deep expertise in concurrency, event-driven architectures, and consistency primitives such as compare-and-swap, atomic dry-runs, and idempotency.
• Experience with systems where correctness has financial consequences, including metering, ledgers, billing, payments, or reservations.
• Technical leadership through influence, including driving multi-team architecture from design through production.
• Strong experience with relational and NoSQL data models and working knowledge of streaming and analytical stores for time-windowed aggregation.
• Experience designing configurable policy- or rules-driven systems with versioning, safe rollout, and rollback.
• Ability to balance enforcement thresholds against legitimate customer activity and measure outcomes.
• Familiarity with monitoring, SLOs, and production root-cause analysis.
• Familiarity with hallucination mitigation strategies such as code constraints, test scaffolding, embeddings, and context injection.
• Excellent communication and cross-functional collaboration skills.
• Pragmatic, hands-on engineering approach balancing long-term vision with iterative execution.

Nice to Have

• Elasticsearch cluster management, multi-tenant indexing, or lifecycle policies.
• ClickHouse or other OLAP systems.
• Event-driven systems, data pipelines, or message brokers.
• Open-source contributions or public technical writing on database performance or systems design.
• Experience building rules engines, velocity checks, or adversarial defense systems at scale.
• Experience with Go, Redis Lua, ClickHouse, and Flink for real-time aggregation.
• Experience scaling early architectures into load-bearing platforms.
• Stream processing with Flink, Kafka Streams, or Beam.
• Columnar analytical stores such as ClickHouse or BigQuery.
• Production experience with Node.js and Go, particularly for latency-sensitive or high-throughput services.
• Experience with AI tools, billing, and metered systems.
• Contributions to open-source tools, internal platforms, or engineering blogs.