Senior Software Engineer - Backend Platform

Details

Hi — I'm Manu, Engineering Manager at Customer.io. We're looking for experienced backend engineers who want to build and own the infrastructure that powers one of the most data-intensive platforms in marketing automation — systems that process millions of events per second, orchestrate complex workflows at scale, and keep everything running reliably for thousands of customers worldwide.

You'll work on the Platform team, tackling hard distributed systems problems: designing for fault tolerance, scaling services under real production pressure, and building the foundational layers that every other team at Customer.io depends on. This isn't just maintenance work — you'll shape the architecture of systems that need to be both highly available and constantly evolving.

If you're someone who gets energized by the intersection of scale, reliability, and developer experience — and wants ownership over infrastructure that truly matters — we'd love to talk.

Responsibilities

• Design and evolve distributed systems in Go to handle billions of daily events and messages and store and index petabytes of data
• Lead architectural decisions around performance, reliability, and real-time event processing
• Improve service-to-service communication through better APIs, messaging systems, and event-driven patterns
• Work across teams to uncover bottlenecks and system issues, and lead initiatives to resolve them for a smoother customer experience
• Tackle high-throughput challenges across data pipelines, queues, and scheduling infrastructure
• Debug production systems at scale using effective instrumentation and resolve issues quickly and confidently
• Share knowledge and raise the bar through public-facing short videos, thoughtful writing, and mentorship
• Leverage AI tools to prototype, move faster, and make better decisions

Requirements

• Significant experience (typically 10+ years) building scalable, distributed systems in Go (or similar statically typed languages)
• Deep experience with databases — relational (MySQL, Postgres) and non-relational (DynamoDB, BigTable) — and making them fast
• Strong instincts around reliability, observability, and fault tolerance
• Comfort reasoning about performance, capacity, and trade-offs at scale
• Experience with event-driven systems, message queues, or data pipelines is a plus
• Comfort working in cloud-native environments (AWS, GCP)
• Familiarity with APIs, observability, and operating production systems
• A collaborative mindset and a bias for action; pride in owning technical decisions

About Customer.io

Over 9,000 companies use the platform to send billions of emails, push notifications, in-app messages, and SMS daily. Customer.io helps teams send smarter, more relevant messages using real-time behavioral data. Under the hood: Go, React, Ember and AI help the company ship fast and scale with confidence.

Compensation & Benefits

• Starting salary: $150,000 - $200,000 USD (or equivalent in local currency) depending on experience and subject to market rate adjustment
• 100% coverage of medical, dental, vision, mental health, and supplemental insurance premiums for you and your family
• 16 weeks paid parental leave, unlimited PTO, stipends for remote work and wellness, a professional development budget, and more

Interview Process

• Application review
• Recruiter call (30 mins)
• Behavioral interview (60 mins)
• System design interview (60 mins)
• Coding interview (60 mins)
• Background check and employment verifications for final candidates

Values

Customer.io values ownership, customer focus, creativity over dogma, inclusion, and transparency. Zoom is used for virtual interviews, and offers are extended in writing on official Customer.io letterhead. For questions, contact [email protected].