Staff Software Engineer (Backend), Technical Support
Outreach
Basic Qualifications:
- Partner closely with the Engineering Manager to shape backend architecture and technical strategy.
- Design and evolve scalable, cloud-native backend systems in Python.
- Own the technical design and implementation of critical backend domains.
- Drive architecture decisions that balance scalability, performance, cost, and delivery speed.
- Lead the design and implementation of GenAI pipelines, including: data ingestion and normalization, embedding generation, semantic search and retrieval, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)
- Ensure GenAI systems are reliable, explainable, and continuously improving.
- Help define evaluation and feedback mechanisms for AI outputs.
- Set and uphold backend engineering standards.
- Lead high-quality code reviews, focusing on: correctness, maintainability, performance, security and data handling
- Mentor senior and mid-level engineers through technical guidance and reviews.
- Identify and proactively reduce technical debt.
- Ensure backend systems are observable and production-ready, including metrics, logging, and alerts.
- Lead efforts to improve reliability, scalability, and performance.
- Design systems with cost awareness, especially for GenAI workloads.
- Work with product design and engineers (PDE) partners, and support team stakeholders to deeply understand user workflows.
- Own backend services in production, including incident response and post-incident improvements.
- Document architecture, APIs, and key design decisions.
- Influence engineering practices beyond immediate team boundaries when needed.
Our Vision of You:
- 8–10+ years of backend software engineering experience.
- Deep expertise in Python for building production backend systems.
- Proven experience designing and scaling distributed systems.
- Strong system design skills, including: service decomposition, data modeling, high-availability architectures
- Experience operating large-scale, production systems in the cloud.
- Strong track record of technical leadership without direct authority.
- Extensive experience conducting code reviews and mentoring engineers.
- Ability to translate ambiguous problems into clear technical direction
- Hands-on experience with GenAI / LLM-based platforms.
- Experience with vector databases or semantic search systems.
- Experience building internal platforms or high-leverage infrastructure