Staff Software Engineer

Grupa OLX; United States; Remote; USD 170,000 - 225,000; Full time

Job summary

Grupa OLX is seeking a Staff Backend Engineer to help scale our Real Estate platforms and accelerate migration of a PHP monolith to microservices in Go. You will design new domains from scratch, owning architectural decisions and guiding teams across the globe.

You will champion scalable distributed systems, CI/CD, REST/GraphQL APIs, and AWS, while mentoring engineers and shaping the long-term technical strategy for the company from a remote-first home-based setup.

Qualifications

• Proven track record in building large-scale backend services.
• Strong CS fundamentals with hands-on coding focus.
• Experience designing AI agent architectures is a plus.
• Ability to work across international teams and time zones.
• Fluent English communication.

Responsibilities

• Architect and own backend services across domains.
• Migrate PHP monolith to microservices in Go.
• Define system boundaries and extraction priorities.
• Lead code reviews, mentoring, and cross-team collaboration.
• Contribute to AI dev harness and context engineering.

Skills

Golang

Java/Kotlin

Backend design

Distributed systems

CI/CD

RESTful APIs

GraphQL

AWS

Mentoring

Leadership

Tools

PostgreSQL

NoSQL

Job description

Join Our Team as an Staff Backend Engineer!

Join our cross-functional team in Real Estate (Otomoto in Poland and brands in Ukraine, Romania and Portugal).

Are you something who is craving scalable problems and dealing with optimizations?

You’ll work with a creative, critical, and well-organized team from the comfort of your house, but as close as we have ever been!

You will play a key role in enabling our organisation to scale efficiently.

The Staff role here means being an independent technical expert - making autonomous decisions and influencing how entire engineering teams work, not just your own code.

The current priority is migrating our PHP monolith to microservices in Go - you design new domains from scratch, based on business understanding. You decide what gets extracted next and why.

We’re also building our own AI dev harness - focusing on context engineering, evals, and agent orchestration, on top of a solid microservices foundation written in Go.

Who are we looking for:

• You can use agentic workflows (Claude Code, Cursor Agent, or equivalent) as your default, not as a novelty.
• You practice context engineering, not just prompt engineering; you design the full information architecture an AI agent needs to succeed: repo structure, CLAUDE.md / AGENTS.md configs, relevant code context, memory, and tool access.
• You understand model routing trade-offs (e.g., when to use Haiku vs. Sonnet vs. Opus) and multi-agent orchestration.
• Strong ownership instinct: AI output is a first draft, not a deliverable; you validate, refactor, and take full accountability.
• You have strong Coding and Computer Science Fundamentals. Roughly ⅔ of your time will be hands-on technical work: designing solutions, steering and reviewing AI-generated code, developing new ideas, and reviewing others' contributions. The rest goes to cross-team influence, mentoring, and strategic alignment.
• Strong background experience in Golang, Java/Kotlin (preferred technologies), and able to work with PHP. Flexible and capable of adjusting to changing project requirements, roles, and backend technologies as needed.
• Scalable Systems Expertise. Experience with large-scale web applications, an economic-thinking mindset, and being able to design well-bounded future-proof domain systems, aligned with the business objectives.
• Deep expertise in scalable distributed systems, CI/CD, RESTful and GraphQL APIs, AWS, and relational + NoSQL databases.
• Big-picture thinker: aligns technical decisions with business strategy, influences without authority.
• Clear communicator in English across engineering, product, and leadership audiences.
• Self-starter who identifies what needs doing and takes initiative without waiting to be asked.
• Skilled Technical Leader and Mentor: Guide and support engineers by setting a strong example. As a Staff Engineer, you are a role model, leading by example and through your expertise