Staff Software Engineer - X Developer Platform

Details

Are you prepared to join the X team and help build the ultimate real-time information-sharing app, revolutionizing how people connect? At X, we’re on a mission to become the trusted global digital public square, committed to protecting freedom of speech and building the future unlimited interactivity. Our goal is to empower every user to freely create and share ideas, fostering open public discourse without barriers. Join us in shaping this thrilling journey where your contribution will be invaluable to our success!

Responsibilities

• Lead System Design & Architecture: Own the end-to-end technical design and implementation of the X Developer Platform, ensuring scalability, reliability, performance, and extensibility for a global user base.
• Drive Technical Strategy: Define and execute the long-term roadmap for developer APIs, infrastructure, and tools, aligning with X’s mission to accelerate human connection and discovery.
• Mentor & Collaborate: Guide a team of engineers through complex technical challenges, fostering a culture of innovation, rigor, quality, and ownership while collaborating cross-functionally with product, design, and operations teams.
• Build for Scale: Develop and optimize systems that handle billions of requests, leveraging cutting-edge technologies to support real-time data processing and high-availability services.
• Solve Hard Problems: Tackle ambiguous, high-stakes challenges—think distributed systems, performance bottlenecks, or novel integrations—delivering solutions that set industry benchmarks.
• Influence Company-Wide Impact: Partner with leadership to identify opportunities where the Developer Platform can unlock new capabilities for X’s ecosystem.

Requirements

We’re seeking a Staff Software Engineer to lead the evolution of our Developer Platform. You’re a technical visionary with a proven track record of designing and delivering complex, high-impact systems. You thrive in ambiguity, excel at mentoring teams, and are passionate about creating tools that empower developers to solve real-world problems. You’re ready to shape the technical strategy for a platform that serves millions globally.

• Strong desire to ship incredible products with a fast-paced & hardcore engineering team
• Eager to build and architect APIs that work with tremendous scale and make it easy for data partners to build new products that enable more innovation.
• You wish to tackle hard product and engineering challenges while working alongside smart and exceptional people with similar skill sets.
• You’re excited to take on complex problems, learn quickly, and persist towards a great solution using First Principles method.
• You are not afraid to make mistakes or remove barriers for the team in order to achieve a higher outcome.
• You have experience working with big data processing (Hadoop, Storm, Scalding, Kafka etc) and NoSQL databases.

Skill Requirements

• Proven Expertise in Designing and Scaling High-Performance APIs.
• The candidate must have 8+ years of experience designing, building, and scaling RESTful or GraphQL APIs that handle massive throughput (e.g., 100M+ requests/day) and real-time data, with a track record of optimizing for latency, reliability, and cost-efficiency.
• Deep Mastery of Distributed Systems and Fault-Tolerant Architecture.
• Demonstrated expertise in distributed systems design, including hands-on experience with technologies like Kafka, Redis, or Kubernetes, and a history of building fault-tolerant, self-healing systems that maintain 99.99% uptime.

Core Requirements

• MS or BS in Computer Science
• 8+ years of industry experience building commercial software apps or services
• Exceptional industry experience with Scala or JVM-based programming language
• Great distributed systems experience (Kafka is a requirement)
• Experience working with RPC frameworks (like Thrift) and microservices
• Understanding of core CS concepts i.e., common data structures and algorithms
• Experience with front-end development tech (e.g., HTML, CSS, JavaScript)
• Experience with cloud platforms and services (e.g., AWS, Azure, Google Cloud)