Staff Backend Architect — Distributed Messaging (Go)

customerio; United States; Remote; USD 200,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Sixteen weeks paid parental leave

Unlimited PTO

Remote work stipend

Wellness stipend

Professional development budget

Healthcare premiums for family

Job summary

customerio is seeking a staff-level backend engineer to shape the architectural direction of distributed messaging systems processing billions of emails, push notifications, in-app messages, and SMS daily. The role emphasizes architectural decisions, mentorship, and raising the technical ceiling across the engineering organization.

You will set strategy for Go services, own cross-squad problems, build consensus on tradeoffs, and drive improvements in observability and reliability.

Qualifications

• Ten+ years building scalable, distributed systems in Go or similar statically typed language.
• Depth across multiple systems or domains, not a single specialty.
• Designing for production reality by quantifying tradeoffs in throughput, cost, and reliability.
• Observability and recovery as first-class concerns: metrics, alerting, rollback, backpressure, checkpointing.
• Experience in cloud-native environments (AWS or GCP) with relational databases and performance tradeoffs.
• Mentorship, technical writing, design reviews, and craft standards that outlast involvement.
• Bias for action with judgment on when to slow down for the right decisions.

Responsibilities

• Set high-level technical direction for distributed messaging services written in Go.
• Own ambiguous, cross-squad problems and drive decisive resolutions.
• Build consensus on technical tradeoffs and communicate to senior leadership.
• Raise the department’s bar through quality, design standards, and mentoring.
• Improve engineering processes and tooling spanning multiple squads.
• Interview engineers and calibrate against the engineering career ladder.
• Use AI agents to perform multi-file changes by scoping work, writing prompts, and verifying outputs.

Skills

Go

Distributed systems

Mentorship

Technical writing

Architecture leadership

Tools

AWS

GCP

Relational databases

Job description

customerio is seeking a staff-level backend engineer to shape the architectural direction of distributed messaging systems processing billions of emails, push notifications, in-app messages, and SMS daily. The role emphasizes architectural decisions, mentorship, and raising the technical ceiling across the engineering organization.

You will set strategy for Go services, own cross-squad problems, build consensus on tradeoffs, and drive improvements in observability and reliability.