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.

What we're looking for

• 10+ years of experience in software engineering, with a focus 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.
• A security-first mindset, ensuring best practices for authentication, authorization, and data protection.
• Strong communication skills, with the ability to present complex technical concepts to diverse audiences.
• A DevOps mindset, embracing automation, testing, and continuous delivery.
• Passion for mentoring and growing engineers, fostering an environment of collaboration and knowledge sharing.

Benefits

• Unlimited PTO - we encourage at least 20 vacation days (in addition to holidays and sick days) so that you can unwind, unplug, and recharge.
• 16 weeks paid parental leave (including adoption and foster care).
• 100% paid insurance premiums for you and your dependents.
• 401k retirement matching - up to 5% dollar-for-dollar match to retirement contributions.
• $1,500 annual healthy lifestyle budget (for gym memberships, classes, fitness equipment).
• $250/monthly Remote Work Stipend to be used for home internet, cell phone, and other miscellaneous remote work costs.
• $300/month co-working space rental reimbursement.
• $2,000/yearly professional education budget for conferences, courses, workshops, books, etc.
• $1,500 home office budget to make sure your working space is ergonomic and just what you need to do your best work!
• One month sabbatical after five years at Customer.io.
• Opportunities to meet in person with your peers throughout the year.