Staff Backend Software Engineer

Stream; Amsterdam; On-site; EUR 110,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equipment & Resources

Stock Options

Health Coverage

Team Lunch and Snacks

Commuter Benefits

Parental leave (US only)

401k (US only)

Job summary

Stream is seeking Staff Software Engineers to join the Chat or Activity Feeds team in Amsterdam. You will own backend systems used by thousands of developers, shaping how they’re structured and scaled.

This is an individual contributor role where you’ll write code and touch databases yourself, with leads also hands-on about 80% of the time. You’ll work with a stack including Go, Python, PostgreSQL, Redis, Kubernetes, and more, delivering production-ready features and influencing cost, latency,

Qualifications

• Extensive backend engineering experience with production systems.
• Proficiency in Go and/or Python in a high-scale environment.
• Experience building features used by many users and scalable APIs.
• Hands-on with Redis and relational databases (PostgreSQL).
• Experience with cloud platforms (GCP or AWS) and containers (Kubernetes).

Responsibilities

• Own backend systems used by thousands of developers, from architecture to scaling.
• Write production-grade code and touch databases yourself as an IC.
• Ship features to production within weeks and own a meaningful area.
• Explain trade-offs and decisions to stakeholders and teammates.

Skills

Backend engineering

Distributed systems

English proficiency

System design

Tools

Go

Python

PostgreSQL

Redis

RabbitMQ

Kubernetes

gRPC

RocksDB

Job description

• We’re looking for Staff Software Engineers. You’ll join our Chat or Activity Feeds team and own backend systems that thousands of developers build their products on, from how they’re structured to how they scale
• This is an individual contributor role, and you’ll write code and touch databases yourself. Our leads spend about 80% of their time hands-on too
• What makes this role exciting:
• Scale: more than 1 billion end users and billions of API requests a month go through the systems you’ll own
• Impact: cost per message and query latency show up directly in our margins and in the apps of customers like Strava and Patreon
• Stack: Go, gRPC, RocksDB and Python; PostgreSQL and RabbitMQ; GCP and Kubernetes; Grafana, Prometheus, ELK (Elasticsearch and Kibana), Jaeger and Tempo for distributed tracing, and Datadog; Redis, Valkey and Memcached
• Starting point: you’ll ship to production in your first weeks and own a meaningful area within your first months

Benefits

• Equipment & Resources: Computers, standing desks, headphones, and other specialized tools are available for you to be successful
• Paid Vacation: Generous time off on top of observing several national holidays
• Stock Options: You get a piece of ownership in Stream. Stock options are granted to all full-time employees
• Health Coverage: We offer comprehensive healthcare, dental, and vision plans, plus generous parental leave (US only)
• Outings and parties: We like to have fun together! Team outings and parties are regular events around here
• Team Lunch and Snacks: Stream provides in-office daily team lunches and a stocked kitchen with tasty snacks and craft coffee
• 401k: Plan for your retirement through the company offered 401k (US only) or the local pension scheme in Amsterdam, to which Stream will make a contribution
• Commuter Benefits: Employees receive free Office parking and transportation benefits
• Monthly fitness stipend: We value the health and well being of our employees

We’re also hiring Senior Engineers on these teams. If your experience fits Senior better than Staff, we’ll say so openly and talk it through with youYou’ve built backend systems at high scale and stayed long enough to live with your own decisions, good and bad. You care about how a system is structured, not only the next feature, and you can explain your trade-offs to the people who’ll live with them. Maybe you led a team for a few years and chose to go back to hands-on workExtensive backend engineering experience, including technical leadership on systems in productionProficiency in Go, Python, or in another backend language plus the willingness to switch to GoExperience building features used by a large number of users, and scaling them as usage growsExperience building public APIs or SDKs that other developers useHands-on experience with Redis or a similar in-memory data storeStrong experience with a relational database. We use PostgreSQL, but any relational database countsGood written and spoken English. It’s our working languageComfort with infrastructure and database work as part of your normal week, including KubernetesDon’t worry if you haven’t used every tool we run. You’ll get exposure to most of them, and you’re welcome to convince us to add your favoritesPostgreSQL in production at scale, including sharding, partitioning or large migrationsExperience improving or redesigning legacy parts of a system that’s serving live trafficGo and gRPC in production at high request ratesMessaging, feeds or other real-time systems, or message queues such as RabbitMQ or KafkaDistributed storage internals, such as Raft or RocksDBYou’ve cut infrastructure cost at a company where margins matteredExperience running workloads on GCP or AWS