Staff Backend Engineer - Platform

Details

Hi, I'm Stephen, Director of Engineering at Customer.io. I’m looking for a Staff Platform Engineer to join our growing Engineering team!

Responsibilities

• Architect and build highly scalable, distributed systems in Go that handle mission-critical workloads.
• Lead design discussions and set best practices for fault tolerance, system reliability, and performance optimization.
• Influence the technical roadmap by identifying key opportunities for innovation and improvement.
• Drive large-scale architectural decisions, ensuring the platform is built for growth and operational excellence.
• Enhance inter-service communication by improving RPC frameworks, event-driven architectures, and data pipelines.
• Develop infrastructure automation to streamline deployments, monitoring, and scaling using Kubernetes, Terraform, and CI/CD tooling.
• Implement and refine observability strategies, leveraging tools like OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, and distributed tracing.
• Mentor and support engineers, fostering a culture of technical excellence and continuous learning.
• Collaborate across teams, influencing product, security, and infrastructure decisions to align with long-term company goals.

Requirements

• Expertise in distributed systems architecture, including consensus algorithms, CAP theorem, eventual consistency, and leader election.
• Strong proficiency in Go (or another strongly typed language like Java, Rust, or Kotlin) with experience building high-performance services.
• Deep knowledge of cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and best practices for scalability, networking, and security.
• Hands-on experience with Kubernetes, Docker, and container orchestration tools.
• Proficiency in infrastructure as code (Terraform, Pulumi, or CloudFormation) to automate cloud-based deployments.
• Experience working with event-driven architectures, messaging systems (Kafka, NATS, RabbitMQ), and real-time data processing.
• Passion for automation, with experience designing and implementing CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions, ArgoCD, Jenkins).
• Strong understanding of observability and debugging techniques, including monitoring, logging, and distributed tracing.
• Excellent problem-solving skills, with the ability to diagnose and resolve complex system issues efficiently.
• Proven track record of leadership, mentoring engineers, driving best practices, and influencing engineering culture.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience in software engineering, focusing on distributed systems, backend infrastructure, or platform engineering.
• 5+ years of experience designing and deploying large-scale distributed architectures in cloud environments.
• Demonstrated ability to lead and influence technical decisions across multiple teams.
• Proven experience designing and optimizing APIs and service-to-service communication patterns (gRPC, REST, GraphQL).
• Deep experience with databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL, DynamoDB, or BigTable) and performance tuning strategies.
• Security-first mindset ensuring best practices for authentication, authorization, and data protection.
• Strong communication skills, capable of presenting complex technical concepts to diverse audiences.
• DevOps mindset embracing automation, testing, and continuous delivery.
• Passion for mentoring and growing engineers, fostering collaboration and knowledge sharing.

About Customer.io

Customer.io powers automated communication that people like to receive. Over 7,600 internet businesses use Customer.io to manage, send, and track emails, SMS, push notifications, and in-app messages, increasing relevance by using behavioral data.

Benefits

• Unlimited PTO including at least 20 vacation days plus holidays and sick days.
• 16 weeks paid parental leave including adoption and foster care.
• 100% paid insurance premiums for employee and dependents.
• 401k retirement matching up to 5%.
• $1,500 annual healthy lifestyle budget.
• $250/month Remote Work Stipend.
• $300/month co-working space rental reimbursement.
• $2,000/year professional education budget.
• $1,500 home office budget.
• One month sabbatical after five years.
• Opportunities for peer meetups.

Hiring Process

• 30-minute video call with Recruiter
• 60-minute scaling interview with engineering team
• Take Home Assignment + 60-minute review call
• Final interview with Hiring Manager

Uses Zoom video calls. Offers in writing. Candidates must not use AI or automation during interviews or assessments.

Join us! We value Empathy, Transparency, Responsibility, and Awkwardness, aiming to build an inclusive and fair hiring process.