Staff Backend Architect - High-Scale Systems, NYC Onsite

Stealth Startup; New York (NY); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Stealth Startup in New York City is seeking a Staff Backend Engineer to define architecture, technical direction and engineering standards for our backend platform. You will stay hands-on while guiding teams through complex technical challenges and operational longevity.

You will lead high-impact initiatives, influence across teams, and establish testing, observability, reliability, and deployment practices to scale our services.

Qualifications

• 5-8 years of professional software engineering experience.

Responsibilities

• Lead the architecture and development of large-scale, highly reliable backend systems.
• Own complex technical initiatives spanning multiple services, teams, and product areas.
• Define scalable architectures, technical standards, and engineering best practices.
• Make critical decisions around APIs, databases, distributed systems, infrastructure, performance, and reliability.
• Identify architectural bottlenecks and proactively improve system scalability and resilience.
• Lead projects from ambiguous problem definition through architecture, implementation, deployment, and long-term operation.
• Write production-quality code and remain deeply involved in implementation and technical problem-solving.
• Establish best practices around testing, observability, reliability, security, and deployment.
• Partner with engineering leadership and product teams on long-term technical strategy.
• Mentor senior engineers and provide technical guidance across the organization.
• Drive technical alignment across teams without relying solely on formal authority.
• Lead incident investigations and develop strategies to prevent recurring production issues.
• Evaluate emerging technologies and determine where they can provide meaningful technical or business value.

Skills

YearsExperience

LargeScaleBackend

ProgrammingLanguages

DistributedSystems

CloudPlatforms

Microservices

CI/CDObservability

TechnicalLeadership

Communication

OnsiteNYC

Tools

Kubernetes

Kafka

Redis

PostgreSQL

gRPC

Job description

Stealth Startup in New York City is seeking a Staff Backend Engineer to define architecture, technical direction and engineering standards for our backend platform. You will stay hands-on while guiding teams through complex technical challenges and operational longevity.

You will lead high-impact initiatives, influence across teams, and establish testing, observability, reliability, and deployment practices to scale our services.