Staff Software Engineer

Our client's Integrations team is looking for a Staff Backend Engineer with a focus on distributed systems to join their ranks. You will work on an existing but rapidly evolving microservice architecture that moves data into, out of, and within hyperscale. This is a chance to get in early and do things right, to solve problems with the least amount of code possible, and to answer hard questions with a scientific, data-driven approach.

What You’ll Do:

• Lead or participate in architectural discussions and decision-making. Debate and commit.
• This is a hands-on IC role. Design and implement Golang microservices within the Integrations ecosystem running in GCP over K8s.
• Own entire data pipelines that span across APIs (gRPC, REST), messaging systems (Google Pub/Sub, AWS SQS, Kafka), shared blob storage (S3, GCS), data warehouses (Bigquery, Cloudberry), and other modalities (NoSQL, Bigtable).
• Work alongside our DevOps engineers to ensure we have the latest and greatest development instrumentation and production observability (tracing, dashboards, alerting, autoscaling, triage automation).
• Ensure our system has 99.999% reliability and uptime, and 0% data loss. Predict all risk vectors during the design stage, and implement solid mitigation strategies to ensure idempotency and transactionality as datasets flow through the pipes.
• Perform scalability and stability analysis through an empirical approach: load testing, tracer-bullet tests in production, failover scenarios, etc.
• Work with both hard requirements and an open-ended future: satisfy today’s needs, but keep in mind where the platform is ultimately going.

What You’ll Have:

• 9+ years of experience in backend development for SaaS products.
• At least 6 years of experience working with distributed microservice systems, ideally in containerized environments (Docker, k8s, ECS).
• Experience with Golang, Rust, or similar non-scripting language. Additional breadth with scripting languages (e.g. Python, Node) is a plus, but not required.
• Familiarity with modern distributed system instrumentation: DataDog, OpenTelemetry, GitHub Actions, ArgoCD - or their equivalent brands.
• B.S. degree in Computer Science preferred.

About You

• You like to show, not tell. When debates arise, you quickly steer the conversation towards restating the problem at hand, defining success criteria, and testing all hypotheses with real data.
• You pick the right tool for each job. No shoehorning in things just because they’re familiar and comfortable.
• You actively keep yourself up to date on the latest technologies: you can make prudent choices of when they’re mature enough for prime-time, and whether they’ll fit in with our stack.
• You feel responsibility over the things you build and see them through.
• You love to solve hard problems. But you also don’t invent them for your personal benefit.
• You cringe at the very idea of tech-debt.