Staff Software Engineer, Back End

Staff Software Engineer, Back End

We’re seeking a highly skilled Staff Software Engineer to focus on integrating cutting-edge AI services and improving backend platform performance. This role offers the opportunity to work on innovative AI-powered features while ensuring the underlying platform is robust, scalable, and efficient. You will collaborate with cross-functional teams to shape the company’s technical landscape.

Responsibilities:

Platform Development -

• Enhance the scalability, performance, and reliability of backend systems to support growing customer demands.
• Improve platform architecture to seamlessly integrate AI services and ensure system stability.
• Address technical challenges related to platform optimization, including performance tuning, reliability improvements, and infrastructure scalability.
• Collaborate with other engineers to implement best practices for backend system development and operations.
• Mentor junior engineers on backend development, AI integration, and system architecture best practices.

AI Integration -

• Design, implement, and maintain backend services to integrate third-party AI systems and APIs, enabling AI-driven functionality within products.
• Collaborate with product managers, architects, and engineers to align AI capabilities with business requirements and deliver AI-powered features seamlessly.
• Evaluate and operationalize third-party AI services and tools to enhance platform offerings.
• Experiment with emerging AI technologies to identify opportunities for innovation and improved user experiences.

Qualifications:

• 8 years of software engineering experience, with a proven track record in backend development for SaaS/PaaS products.
• 5 years of experience in Java/JVM and Spring Framework, with expertise in building and scaling microservices. Real-world experience with at least one non-Java JVM language (Kotlin, Scala, Groovy, Clojure, etc.)
• Excellent programming fundamentals: functional and object-oriented principles, composable, reliable, scalable, maintainable design.
• Experience troubleshooting JVM-based applications in production at scale. Heap dump analysis, log analysis, profiling, etc.
• Strong practical knowledge of at least one RDBMS (e.g., MySQL) and comfort working with both raw SQL and ORM via Hibernate/JPA/Spring Data. Schema design skills for performant queries, indexing, and appropriate normalization.
• Experience designing APIs that support multiple clients and evolve over time.
• Understanding of cloud platforms (AWS preferred) and experience operating backend JVM-based services in containerized environments, particularly ECS or K8s.
• Knowledge of caching patterns and strategies. Familiarity with a system such as Redis or DynamoDB.
• Secure coding and cryptography fundamentals. Symmetric and asymmetric algorithms, hash functions, key management systems, and their applications.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience operationalizing AI-driven features and familiarity with large language model integrations and prompting, implementing agents and conversation state management (nice to have, but not required)

Type: Full-Time

Location: Menlo Park, CA (onsite 2 days/week)

Compensation: 170k-190k base bonus (DOE)

*No 3rd party agencies or C2C*