STAFF SOFTWARE ENGINEER

Svitla Systems Inc. is looking for a Principal Staff Engineer for a full-time position (40 hours per week) in Ukraine. Our client is a leading on-site work marketplace seeking creative and skilled developers to join the global engineering team. The mission is to design and develop technology that improves users' lives while providing an exceptionally high level of service.

The Staff Software Engineer for Backend Platform Modernization is a pivotal role driving the evolution of the core platform from a risky, tightly coupled distributed monolith into a governed, testable, and scalable services ecosystem. You will lead the modernization of the business logic layer by establishing a clean orchestration/coordination layer, defining a "Golden Service Template" in a modern compiled language, and migrating high-impact flows off the core monolithic application. Your work will unlock parallel delivery across teams, reduce incidents and change failure rates, and dramatically improve our ability to ship high-quality features at speed.

This role requires working hours with overlap till 7:00 PM CET (8:00pm UA time)

Requirements

• 8+ years building scalable services and APIs with modern compiled languages; deep experience transforming monoliths into governed service architectures.
• 8+ years of commercial experience with NodeJS and/or PHP, Golang
• Strong experience with JavaScript
• Strong commercial experience with AWS cloud and its services, specifically with AWS - Step functions, AWS Glue
• 3+ years of tech leading/staff engineering experience
• Orchestration and integration experience: Proven success implementing gateways/orchestration layers, routing strategies, and composition of legacy and greenfield services.
• Event-driven architecture: Hands-on with messaging systems, schema evolution, idempotency, and eventual consistency; strong grasp of trade‑offs and user impact.
• Testing at scale: Experience establishing reliable integration/E2E testing, contract testing, test data management, and eliminating flaky tests to speed developer feedback loops.
• CI/CD and reliability: Strong background in build pipelines, deployment strategies, observability (logs/metrics/traces), and reducing change failure rate.
• Domain modeling and migration: Familiarity with strangler fig patterns, brownfield refactoring, and safe data migration techniques (backfills, dual‑writes, cutovers)
• Commercial experience with Kubernetes is helpful
• Experience with Docker
• Pragmatic leadership: Ability to set standards, influence cross‑team adoption, and deliver incremental wins while de‑risking larger modernization goals.
• System integration skills: Strong knowledge of REST/GraphQL APIs, webhooks, eventing, and data transformation pipelines; attention to compatibility and versioning
  
  

Responsibilities

• Architect and implement an orchestration/coordination layer in front of legacy monolith that routes and composes business logic across legacy and modern services, enabling side‑by‑side operation and targeted migrations.
• Establish and evangelize a standard service template in a modern compiled language (e.g., Go/Java/C#) with opinionated patterns for data access, eventing, testing, observability, and CI/CD. Ensure that all new backend work adheres to these conventions.
• Set boundaries for when and how the monolithic codebase can be updated; partner with 2–3 designated teams to minimize risky changes and reduce coordination overhead across the broader organization.
• Identify and migrate the most impactful core actions and business events from the legacy codebase into decoupled services; instrument key events to power an event‑driven architecture and improve cross‑system reliability.
• Collaborate with QA and platform teams to expand end‑to‑end and integration test coverage, improve test reliability and speed, and eliminate dead code to reduce maintenance surface area.
• Break bottlenecks by distributing code across repositories, standardizing build packs and workflows, and driving build/deploy times from ~hourly to minutes with fast rollback.
• Champion domain decomposition, contract versioning, idempotent and resilient patterns (outbox, retries, DLQs), and eventual consistency where appropriate to balance correctness, latency, and user experience.
• Provide technical leadership, training, and certification guidance to help engineers confidently build with the Golden Service Template and modernization standards.
• Use DORA metrics and business KPIs (lead time, CFR ≤10%, incident reduction 70%, parallel team throughput) to guide iterative improvements and demonstrate value.
  
  

WE OFFER

• US and EU projects based on advanced technologies.
• Competitive compensation based on skills and experience.
• Regular performance appraisals to support your growth.
• Flexibility in workspace, either remote or in one of our development offices.
• Comprehensive medical insurance, including dental and massages.
• Personalized learning program tailored to your interests and skill development.
• Sport reimbursement program for onsite and online activities.
• Bonuses for recommendations of new employees.
• Bonuses for article writing, public talks, and other activities.
• 20 vacation days, 10 national holidays and 5 sick leaves.
• Maternity leave policy and family days off.
• Free tech webinars and meetups organized by Svitla.
• Welcome and anniversary presents, gifts for children, and more.
• Regular corporate events and meetups.
• Awesome team, friendly and supportive community!