# Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Product)

**Company:** [Otter](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/otter)
**Location:** Seattle, WA
**Role:** Backend Engineering
**Salary:** $210k – $275k/yr
**Experience:** 10+ years
**Skills:** System Design, Distributed Systems, Data-Intensive Systems, LLMs, RAG, Prompting, Evaluation Frameworks
**Posted:** 2026-07-07

> Staff backend engineer designing foundational systems and architecture for AI-native product experiences, including generation pipelines, data models, and evaluation frameworks. Requires 10+ years scaling complex distributed systems, cross-team leadership, and strong product intuition.

## Job Description

## Your Impact

- Define system architecture for AI-native product surfaces
- Design foundational systems (generation pipelines, data models, evaluation frameworks) that power multiple product areas.
- Drive cross-team technical strategy
- Lead initiatives that span product, AI, and infrastructure teams, ensuring alignment on architecture and execution.
- Establish best practices for AI product engineering
- Set standards for how we build with AI—covering areas like evaluation, reliability, iteration loops, and system design.
- Translate ambiguity into scalable systems and product direction
- Take loosely defined opportunities and turn them into clear technical approaches and execution plans.
- Raise the bar across the organization
- Influence engineering quality, system design, and product thinking beyond your immediate team.
- Shape how AI accelerates engineering velocity
- Drive adoption and best practices for AI-assisted development, improving how teams design, build, and iterate on product.

## Requirements

- 10+ years of experience building and scaling complex systems
- Strong track record of owning technical and product direction for large or ambiguous problem spaces
- Deep expertise in system design, especially in data-intensive or distributed systems
- Experience leading cross-team initiatives and influencing without direct authority
- Strong product intuition and can balance user experience, system constraints, and business impact
- Comfortable operating at a high level of ambiguity and defining both the problem and the solution

## Nice-to-Haves

- Experience building or experimenting with LLM-powered features (prompting, evaluation, RAG, etc.)
- Experience designing systems that balance latency, cost, and quality
- Exposure to user feedback loops, experimentation, or evaluation frameworks

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**Apply:** https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/a63fa735-8585-414a-9b45-53246be22c01
**Canonical:** https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/a63fa735-8585-414a-9b45-53246be22c01