Staff Backend Architect — Scale Messaging Systems

Customer.io; United States; On-site; USD 200,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical coverage

Parental leave

Unlimited PTO

Remote work stipends

Dev budget

Professional development

Job summary

Customer.io is seeking a staff engineer to set the technical direction for our massive messaging systems. You will shape architecture, cross-team collaboration, and the engineering bar with mentorship and scalable design.

You’ll drive production-focused decisions, champion observability and recovery, and contribute to framework and tooling that elevates the entire department. Expect a rigorous, impact-driven environment with AI-enabled coding support.

Qualifications

• 10+ years building scalable, distributed systems in Go or similar statically typed languages.
• Depth across multiple systems or domains; be the recognized expert in more than one area.
• Design for production reality with clear tradeoffs in throughput and cost.
• Experience designing observability and recovery as first-class concerns.
• Comfort with cloud-native environments (AWS, GCP) and relational databases (MySQL).
• Mentorship, technical writing, design review, and standards that outlast involvement.

Responsibilities

• Shape the technical direction of our distributed messaging systems in Go and set high-level architectural direction.
• Tackle ambiguous, high-stakes problems crossing squads and drive decisions.
• Build consensus on technical questions and communicate tradeoffs to senior leadership.
• Raise the department's bar by setting standards, mentoring engineers, and creating reusable frameworks.
• Drive engineering process and tooling improvements across squads.
• Interview and calibrate against our career ladder with honest assessments.
• Leverage AI agents to scope work, write prompts, and verify outputs across multi-file changes.

Skills

Go

Distributed systems

Architecture leadership

Mentorship

Observability

Cloud experience

MySQL

Technical writing

AI tooling

Tools

AWS

GCP

Job description

Customer.io is seeking a staff engineer to set the technical direction for our massive messaging systems. You will shape architecture, cross-team collaboration, and the engineering bar with mentorship and scalable design.

You’ll drive production-focused decisions, champion observability and recovery, and contribute to framework and tooling that elevates the entire department. Expect a rigorous, impact-driven environment with AI-enabled coding support.