Staff Backend Engineer - Developer Foundations

Fetch; Northern (KY); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

Fetch is hiring a Staff Backend Engineer to design and build the systems behind the developer experience. You will own architecture across developer tooling, test infrastructure, and engineering workflows, and you’ll be hands-on building SDKs, reusable components, and shared platforms that raise engineering velocity.

This senior role focuses on system design and execution, not people management, with broad influence across teams. Remote US or US offices are supported for this full-time role.

Qualifications

• 12+ years designing, building, and operating backend or platform systems at scale.
• Deep experience owning architecture for complex distributed systems and making high-impact tradeoffs.
• Ability to translate ambiguous goals into robust designs with clear technical tradeoffs.

Responsibilities

• Design and build tools, SDKs, and evaluation frameworks to improve developer velocity.
• Architect core building blocks for cross-platform reliability and scalability.
• Build observability and governance for developer tooling and platform health.
• Evolve internal libraries and marketplaces of reusable templates and components with governance.

Skills

Go

Python

Distributed systems

AWS

APIs & SDKs

CI/CD tooling

AI-assisted development

Leadership mentoring

Tools

AgentCore

GitHub Copilot

Job description

Meet Fetch Platform Engineering

Platform engineering at Fetch is grounded in service to developers, strong ownership, and purposeful innovation. Rather than building end-user features, platform engineers focus on the foundations that other teams rely on, spanning core systems, architecture, automation, and developer workflows.

This work lives in complex problem spaces where the right answer is rarely obvious. Our engineers navigate ambiguity with data and sound judgment, understand tradeoffs, and partner closely across product and engineering to solve problems that scale. We maintain a high technical bar and value practicality, curiosity, and continuous improvement.

This is an environment for builders who enjoy shaping durable platforms, improving developer experience at scale, and enabling teams across Fetch to ship with confidence.

About the Role:

Fetch is building the most rewarding way to shop, and how fast and reliably our engineers ship is a big part of how we get there. We invest heavily in the tools, standards, and infrastructure that help engineers deliver reliable software faster across backend, mobile, ML, and web, including modernizing our developer workflows with AI-assisted development.

We're hiring a Staff Backend Engineer to design and build the systems behind that developer experience. You'll own architecture across developer tooling, test infrastructure, and engineering workflows, and you'll be hands-on building the SDKs, reusable components, and shared platforms that raise engineering velocity and quality across the company. This is a senior technical role focused on system design and execution, not people management, but it carries broad influence: you'll set architectural direction, define standards, and mentor engineers across multiple teams.

This is a high-impact role at the intersection of developer platforms, engineering infrastructure, and operational excellence, where scalability, reliability, and quality are non-negotiable. This is a full-time role that can be held in our US offices or remotely in the United States.

This is a full-time role that can be held in our US offices or remotely in the United States.

What you'll do at Fetch (Role Responsibilities):

• Design and build the tools, golden paths, SDKs, and evaluation frameworks that improve how engineers deliver high-quality software, including AI-assisted development workflows.
• Architect core building blocks such as cross-platform contract testing, integration test infrastructure, and unified components that make development reliable across backend, mobile, and data.
• Build observability and governance for developer tooling, including telemetry and metrics that give visibility into developer productivity, code quality, and platform health.
• Design and evolve internal libraries and marketplaces of reusable templates and components, with quality gates, versioning, and lifecycle governance that sustain adoption at scale.
• Evaluate and integrate emerging developer tools, including AI-assisted development tools, and turn the promising ones into production-grade platform capabilities.
• Lead architectural decisions across multiple services and domains, balancing reliability, developer velocity, maintainability, and operational cost as the platform grows.
• Improve engineering leverage by identifying opportunities for platformization, reusable services, and shared infrastructure that accelerate development across multiple teams.
• Partner across Engineering, Product, and Data to define platform capabilities, evaluate technical tradeoffs, and align technical investments with measurable adoption and quality outcomes.
• Raise the bar on engineering standards, systems-level thinking, and operational excellence, helping teams shift from feature-delivery to system-creation.
• Influence org-level technical priorities and investment, partnering with engineering and product leadership to sequence multi-quarter platform bets and set technical direction across the org, not just execute a roadmap.
• Mentor senior engineers and set standards for design, reliability, and maintainability, driving influence well beyond your direct areas of ownership.

In your Toolbox (Minimum Requirements):

• 12+ years designing, building, and operating backend or platform systems at scale, with a strong programming background in Go, Python, or similar (Kotlin/Swift a plus).
• Deep experience owning architecture for complex distributed systems (scalability, failure modes, operational maturity) and making high-impact architectural and investment tradeoffs that set technical direction for a broad domain, not just executing a roadmap.
• Ability to independently translate ambiguous technical and product goals into robust designs with clear technical and operational tradeoffs.
• Strong developer platform and internal tooling background (test/CI infrastructure, distributed backend systems), including designing APIs, SDKs, and shared services with clear boundaries for multiple teams, and building reusable libraries, templates, and paved-road abstractions across heterogeneous repos and toolchains.
• Hands-on experience with AI-assisted development tools (e.g., GitHub Copilot, Claude Code) and a track record of using them to improve velocity, quality, or developer experience.
• Proven experience shipping production agents and tuning coding-harness workflows across planning, execution, verification, and failure recovery.
• Experience designing evaluations for production agents, including deterministic checks, LLM-based judges, regression benchmarks, and end-to-end testing suites.
• Commitment to engineering excellence and systems thinking: reliability, observability, incident management, reproducibility, versioning, execution safety, and enforcing acceptance criteria before changes ship.
• Demonstrated influence beyond direct ownership, including mentoring senior engineers and setting standards for system design and quality.
• Strong experience with AWS and cloud-native systems; experience with AgentCore is a significant plus.

Nice to haves/Bonus Points (Preferred Requirements):

• Experience with agentic and LLM-assisted development workflows: agent frameworks, tool and prompt orchestration, and evaluation harnesses for model and agent output.
• Experience building or scaling an internal developer platform, developer experience, or platform engineering capability, including through periods of rapid company growth.
• Experience curating internal marketplaces, reusable component libraries, or golden-path ecosystems with quality and lifecycle governance.
• Experience with contract testing, integration test infrastructure, and telemetry/measurement systems for engineering effectiveness, developer productivity, and code quality.
• Familiarity with the backend infrastructure that powers mobile (iOS and Android), ML, and web experiences.
• Prior Staff or Principal-level experience driving architectural direction across teams, platforms, or product domains.
• ML engineering experience, particularly applied to agent evaluation, model behavior, or production AI systems, is a plus.

Compensation:

At Fetch, we offer competitive compensation packages including base, equity, and benefits to the exceptional folks we hire. Discover our benefits and how our employees live rewarded at https://fetch.com/careers.