Staff Backend Engineer

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

We are looking for an exceptional Staff Backend Engineer to help define the architecture, technical direction, and engineering standards of our backend platform.

This is a high-impact technical leadership role for an engineer who combines deep backend expertise with strong systems thinking and the ability to influence engineering decisions across teams.

You will remain highly hands-on while owning some of the company's most complex technical challenges and helping other engineers operate at a higher level.

What You’ll Do

• 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.

Required Qualifications

• 5-8 years of professional software engineering experience, with substantial backend and systems experience.
• Proven experience designing and operating large-scale production backend systems.
• Expert‑level proficiency in one or more backend programming languages such as Go, Java, Python, C++, or Node.js.
• Deep understanding of distributed systems, databases, networking, APIs, concurrency, and system architecture.
• Experience designing systems for high availability, reliability, performance, and scale.
• Strong experience with cloud platforms such as AWS, GCP, or Azure.
• Strong understanding of microservices, event‑driven architectures, queues, caching, and service‑to‑service communication.
• Experience with production infrastructure, CI/CD, observability, monitoring, and incident response.
• Demonstrated ability to lead technically complex projects involving multiple engineers or teams.
• Excellent technical communication and ability to influence engineering decisions across an organization.
• Ability to work onsite in New York City.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience operating systems at significant scale.
• Deep experience with technologies such as Kubernetes, Kafka, Redis, PostgreSQL, gRPC, or similar infrastructure.
• Experience with high‑throughput or low‑latency systems.
• Experience building platforms or infrastructure used by multiple engineering teams.
• Experience in AI/ML infrastructure, data‑intensive systems, or real‑time systems.
• Experience at a high‑growth startup or technology company.
• Strong open‑source contributions or demonstrated technical leadership outside of day‑to‑day responsibilities.

What We’re Looking For

A Staff Engineer should be more than an excellent coder. You should be someone who can look across an entire technical ecosystem, identify the highest‑leverage problems, and drive solutions that improve the organization as a whole.

You are comfortable operating in ambiguity, challenging existing architectural assumptions, and making decisions that balance performance, reliability, scalability, engineering velocity, and business priorities.

You lead through technical expertise and influence rather than title, while remaining hands‑on enough to understand the systems you own at a deep level.

This is an onsite Staff Engineering role based in New York City.