Staff Backend Engineer

SkillBench; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

A tech startup in San Francisco is seeking a Staff Backend Engineer - Production Platform (Tech Lead). You will lead productionization for product launches and key iterations while owning the architecture and standards as the team scales. The ideal candidate has 7+ years of backend development experience, strong architecture leadership, and is comfortable with productionizing analytics and telemetry. This full-time role offers meaningful equity and potential for contract-to-perm work.

Qualifications

• 7+ years building production backend and data systems.
• Strong architecture leadership + mentoring track record.
• IaC / CI/CD mastery (Terraform/Helm/GitOps or equivalent).
• Observability + SLO experience (Prometheus/Grafana or equivalent).
• Experience in productionizing analytics / telemetry / ML pipelines.

Responsibilities

• Lead productionization for upcoming launches and key product iterations.
• Own our architecture and engineering standards as we scale.

Skills

Building production backend and data systems

Architecture leadership + mentoring

IaC / CI/CD mastery (Terraform/Helm/GitOps)

Observability + SLO experience (Prometheus/Grafana)

Productionizing analytics / telemetry / ML pipelines

B2B SaaS + AI product experience

Interest in building developer tools

Job description

Overview

We’re hiring at SkillBench: Staff Backend Engineer - Production Platform (Tech Lead)

AI is rapidly transforming how software gets built. With coding assistants like Claude Code and Cursor, the job isn’t just “write code faster” — it’s shifting toward directing, verifying, iterating, and learning in a new workflow. Adoption is accelerating, leadership is demanding ROI, and teams are making big bets under uncertainty. But AI changes more than speed: it reshapes how developers work and the skills they build. Most teams still can’t tell whether AI adoption is compounding advantage or creating risk that only shows up months later.

SkillBench (a startup that I co-founded with Matt Beane) is building the measurement layer for AI-native software development. We instrument developer workflows in a privacy-first way (without surveillance) and translate longitudinal workflow signals into insights that leaders can actually act on—while giving individual developers something they genuinely want and can use immediately: visibility into whether they’re getting better, where they’re improving (or regressing), and what their real growth trajectory looks like in an AI-assisted world.

Beyond measurement, we’re building the predictive layer that turns telemetry into org design decisions—where capability is compounding vs. eroding, how to redesign work, and how to steer AI adoption responsibly over time.

We’re a research-driven team of ~10 engineers and researchers across Korea, Taiwan, and California, with strategic business and research collaborations with top global firms. We’re targeting product v1 in Q1 2026.

Responsibilities

We’re hiring a Staff Backend Engineer - Production Platform (Tech Lead) to lead productionization for our upcoming launches and key product iterations, and own our architecture and engineering standards as we scale.

• Lead productionization for upcoming launches and key product iterations
• Own our architecture and engineering standards as we scale

High ownership, meaningful equity, and full-time role (contract-to-perm also possible).

Qualifications

• 7+ years building production backend and data systems
• Strong architecture leadership + mentoring track record
• IaC / CI/CD mastery (Terraform/Helm/GitOps or equivalent)
• Observability + SLO experience (Prometheus/Grafana/Tempo or equivalents)
• Experience in productionizing analytics / telemetry / ML pipelines into reliable services
• B2B SaaS + AI product experience strongly preferred (sensitive enterprise data / regulated domain experience is a plus)
• Optional but highly recommended
• Interest and experience in building developer tools and AI-enabled engineering workflows involving modern coding assistants such as Claude Code, Cursor, or GitHub Copilot
• High ownership, meaningful equity, and full-time role (contract-to-perm also possible)

How to apply

• If you’re interested, send your resume or LinkedIn + 1–2 bullets on a project where you took a prototype/analytics system into production (bonus if it involved strict data governance).
• To apply: Email [e-mail] (subject: Production Platform TL) or DM me.
• If someone comes to mind, I’d love an intro! Sharing is hugely appreciated.