Staff Backend Engineer
Staff Backend Engineer responsible for architecting and building developer platforms, tooling, SDKs, test infrastructure, and AI-assisted workflows that improve engineering velocity and reliability. Requires 12+ years of backend or platform experience, distributed-systems expertise, strong programming skills, and broad technical influence.
About the job
Responsibilities
- Design and build tools, golden paths, SDKs, and evaluation frameworks that improve software delivery, including AI-assisted development workflows.
- Architect cross-platform contract testing, integration test infrastructure, and unified components for backend, mobile, and data development.
- Build observability and governance for developer tooling, including telemetry and metrics for developer productivity, code quality, and platform health.
- Design and evolve internal libraries and marketplaces of reusable templates and components, with quality gates, versioning, and lifecycle governance.
- Evaluate emerging developer tools, including AI-assisted development tools, and turn promising tools into production-grade platform capabilities.
- Lead architectural decisions across services and domains while balancing reliability, developer velocity, maintainability, and operational cost.
- Identify opportunities for platformization, reusable services, and shared infrastructure that accelerate development across teams.
- Partner with Engineering, Product, and Data to define platform capabilities, evaluate tradeoffs, and align investments with measurable adoption and quality outcomes.
- Raise engineering standards, systems-level thinking, and operational excellence.
- Influence organization-level technical priorities and multi-quarter platform investments.
- Mentor senior engineers and establish standards for design, reliability, and maintainability.
Requirements
- 12+ years designing, building, and operating backend or platform systems at scale.
- Strong programming background in Go, Python, or similar; Kotlin or Swift is a plus.
- Deep experience owning architecture for complex distributed systems, including scalability, failure modes, and operational maturity.
- Ability to translate ambiguous technical and product goals into robust designs with clear technical and operational tradeoffs.
- Strong developer-platform and internal-tooling experience, including test and CI infrastructure, distributed backend systems, APIs, SDKs, shared services, reusable libraries, templates, and paved-road abstractions.
- Hands-on experience with AI-assisted development tools such as GitHub Copilot and Claude Code.
- Experience shipping production agents and tuning coding-harness workflows across planning, execution, verification, and failure recovery.
- Experience designing production-agent evaluations, including deterministic checks, LLM-based judges, regression benchmarks, and end-to-end testing suites.
- Commitment to reliability, observability, incident management, reproducibility, versioning, execution safety, and enforcing acceptance criteria before release.
- Demonstrated influence beyond direct ownership, including mentoring senior engineers and setting system-design and quality standards.
- Strong experience with AWS and cloud-native systems.
Nice to Have
- Experience with Kotlin or Swift.
- Experience with AgentCore.
Compensation and Benefits
- Full-time role available from a US office or remotely within the United States.
Skills
Go, Python, Kotlin, Swift, AWS, Cloud-Native Systems, Distributed Systems, Developer Platforms, Internal Tooling, Ci Infrastructure, SDKs, Contract Testing, Observability, Github Copilot, Claude Code
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