Staff Backend Software Engineer

Responsibilities

• Own the backend services that manage printer identity, connectivity, provisioning, updates, and telemetry. Keep them resilient and highly available as the fleet grows, and drive the design of new services that unlock new device capabilities.
• Design and improve how printers come up, install, and update, from initial bring-up through in-field OS updates and rollbacks. Apply deep Linux fundamentals to real problems in the field.
• Design the protocols, connections, and failure modes that keep printers talking to the cloud reliably from anywhere in the world, including flaky networks, restrictive corporate firewalls, and long offline periods. Focus on latency, back-pressure, retries, and reliability details.
• Take full ownership of substantial backend initiatives, from design through production rollout on real printers. Influence architectural decisions and help shape the long-term direction of the cloud-to-device platform.
• Participate in on-call for the services owned, drive incident response and postmortems, and turn recurring pain into permanent fixes. Help other teams operate dependent services.
• Work as a senior technical contributor across backend, infrastructure, and device teams. Translate product and operational needs into robust designs, raise the bar through design and code review, and mentor engineers.

Requirements

• 8+ years of experience building and operating production backend services, with a track record of driving major initiatives end to end.
• Deep Linux fundamentals: processes, filesystems, networking, systemd, boot and init, package management, users and permissions, and the ability to debug production Linux problems from first principles.
• Strong networking skills: TCP/IP, TLS, DNS, HTTP, WebSockets, NAT and firewall traversal, and comfort reasoning about connectivity between services in the cloud and devices on customer networks.
• Hands-on experience with OS provisioning and lifecycle: installing, imaging, updating, and rolling back Linux systems in the field, including A/B update strategies or similar patterns.
• Expert-level proficiency in at least one modern backend language (Python, Go, Node/TypeScript, C++, or similar), and comfort dropping into others when needed.
• A production mindset: think about failure modes, blast radius, observability, and upgrade paths from the start, and have carried a pager for systems built.
• Strong communication, debugging, and problem-solving skills.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.

Nice-to-Haves

• Experience building IoT or connected-device backends at scale.
• Hands-on experience with MQTT or similar pub/sub protocols in production, including broker operations, QoS trade-offs, and offline/reconnect semantics.
• Experience with fleet management, remote diagnostics, or OTA update systems.
• Familiarity with edge compute, embedded Linux distributions, or bring-up of new hardware.
• Familiarity with Bazel or another polyglot monorepo build system.