Staff Software Engineer – Platform & Distributed Systems

About the Role

We are seeking a highly experienced Staff Software Engineer to lead the design and evolution of our core platform and infrastructure systems. This role requires deep expertise in backend engineering, cloud-native architectures, distributed systems, and large-scale platform development.

As a Staff Engineer, you will drive technical strategy, influence architecture across multiple teams, mentor senior engineers, and solve complex engineering challenges that impact the entire organization.

What You’ll Do

• Lead architecture and design for critical platform and infrastructure services.
• Build scalable, resilient, and secure backend systems using Python.
• Drive engineering excellence through design reviews, technical standards, and architectural governance.
• Design and optimize distributed systems handling high-volume traffic and business-critical workloads.
• Partner with product, engineering, and leadership teams to align technical direction with business goals.
• Lead initiatives around platform scalability, reliability, observability, and operational excellence.
• Improve developer productivity through platform tooling, automation, and self-service infrastructure.
• Mentor senior engineers and act as a technical leader across multiple teams.
• Identify and address long-term technical risks and platform bottlenecks.
• Champion best practices in software design, testing, deployment, and system operations.

Required Experience

Core Engineering

• 4-8 years of professional software engineering experience.
• Strong expertise in Python and backend system development.
• Proven track record of building and operating large-scale production systems.
• Deep understanding of software architecture, design patterns, and engineering best practices.

Distributed Systems

• Extensive experience designing and operating distributed systems.
• Strong understanding of:
  • Scalability patterns
  • Fault tolerance
  • Event-driven architectures
  • Asynchronous processing
  • Service-to-service communication
  • Data consistency models
  • Reliability engineering

Cloud & Infrastructure

• Deep hands-on experience with AWS.
• Strong understanding of:
  • Compute and container platforms
  • Networking
  • Storage systems
  • Security and IAM
  • Monitoring and observability
  • Cost optimization
• Experience operating cloud-native systems at scale.

System Design

• Demonstrated expertise in designing complex, high-scale systems.
• Experience leading architecture for:
  • Platform services
  • Internal developer platforms
  • Core infrastructure systems
  • High-throughput backend services
  • Multi-tenant applications

Platform Engineering & DevOps

• Experience with Kubernetes and containerized workloads.
• Infrastructure-as-Code expertise (Terraform preferred).
• Strong understanding of CI/CD and deployment automation.
• Experience building internal platforms and developer tooling.

Data & Storage

• Strong knowledge of relational and non-relational databases.
• Experience with caching, data partitioning, replication, and performance optimization.
• Familiarity with event streaming and messaging platforms.

Staff-Level Expectations

Candidates should demonstrate significant experience in at least 5–10 of the following areas:

• Large-scale system architecture.
• Distributed systems design.
• AWS cloud infrastructure.
• Platform engineering.
• Kubernetes and container orchestration.
• Infrastructure automation.
• Reliability and observability engineering.
• Event-driven architectures.
• Developer platform and tooling development.
• Technical leadership across multiple teams.
• Performance and scalability optimization.
• Security and operational excellence.

Ideal Candidate

• Strong systems thinker with exceptional problem-solving ability.
• Influences engineering direction beyond their immediate team.
• Balances long-term architectural vision with practical execution.
• Comfortable leading ambiguous, cross-functional technical initiatives.
• Passionate about building robust platforms that enable teams to move faster and scale effectively.