Staff Software Engineer, Backend

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

Benefits offered by this job

100% healthcare coverage

16 weeks parental leave

Unlimited PTO

Remote work stipend

Professional development budget

Job summary

Customer.io is seeking a staff engineer to set the technical direction for our massively scaled messaging platform. You will steer architecture decisions, raise engineering capability, and partner across squads to ensure scalable, reliable delivery of billions of messages daily.

You’ll lead high-impact initiatives, mentor senior engineers, and help evolve our career ladder and engineering processes with practical, evidence-based judgments.

Qualifications

• 10+ years building scalable, distributed systems in Go or similar statically typed languages.
• Demonstrated cross-system expertise and leadership.
• Experience designing for production reality with measurable tradeoffs.

Responsibilities

• Shape the technical direction of distributed messaging systems in Go, balancing scale, cost and reliability.
• Drive cross-squad, high-stakes problems to clear decisions and align leadership.
• Mentor senior engineers, raise the department's bar, and codify frameworks and docs.

Skills

Go

Distributed systems

Mentorship

Architecture

Cloud-native

Tools

AWS

GCP

MySQL

Job description

Hi, I'm Paul, VP of Engineering at Customer.io . We're looking for a staff engineer to set technical direction for the systems that move billions of messages a day. This isn't a role about shipping more, faster. It's about deciding what gets built, where the architecture needs to go next, and raising the ceiling for the engineers around you.

Over 9,000 companies — from scrappy startups to global brands — use our platform to send billions of emails, push notifications, in-app messages, and SMS every day. Customer.io powers automated communication that people actually want to receive.

We help teams send smarter, more relevant messages using real-time behavioral data. Under the hood: Go, React, Ember and AI help us ship fast and scale with confidence.

What We Value

Ownership at company scale

You take on the problems nobody has claimed yet — the ones that span squads, have no obvious owner, and would quietly cost us a year if left alone. You either solve them or get leadership aligned to.

Engineers with product taste

You think like a user, not just an engineer. You connect architectural decisions to what customers actually experience, and you can explain that connection to people who don't write Go.

A healthy skepticism for "the way things are done"

You retire practices that have outlived their usefulness, including ones you helped build. Best practices matter — but never more than forward motion.

Force multiplication

Your best quarter isn't measured by what you shipped. It's measured by what the department can now do that it couldn't before.

What You'll Do

• Shape the technical direction of our distributed messaging systems in Go — making the high-level architectural calls on mission-critical services where scale, cost, and reliability are all in tension
• Take on ambiguous, high-stakes problems that cross squad and function boundaries, and drive them to a decision when the right answer isn't obvious to anyone yet
• Build consensus on contested technical questions across teams, and communicate the tradeoffs clearly enough that senior leadership can act on them
• Raise the department's bar — set quality and design standards, mentor senior engineers, and turn what you know into frameworks and documentation other teams can use without you in the room
• Drive engineering process and tooling improvements that span multiple squads, not just your own
• Interview and calibrate against our career ladder, giving honest, evidence-based assessments of candidates
• Use AI agents to make multi-file changes by scoping the work, writing the prompt, and verifying the output

What we're looking for

• 10+ years building scalable, distributed systems in Go (or similar statically typed languages), including several as the person others turned to on architecture
• Depth across multiple systems or domains, not just one — you've been the recognized expert in more than one place
• A track record of designing for production reality: you quantify tradeoffs in throughput, cost, and reliability rather than picking a reasonable path and defending it
• Experience designing observability and recovery as first-class concerns — metrics, alerting, rollback, backpressure, checkpointing — not logging added afterward
• Comfort working in cloud-native environments (AWS, GCP), with relational databases (we use MySQL) and a real understanding of performance tradeoffs
• Evidence of making other engineers better: mentorship, technical writing, design review, standards that outlasted your involvement
• A bias for action over perfection, and the judgment to know which decisions are worth slowing down for

We believe in transparency. Starting salary for this role is $200,000 - $240,000 USD (or equivalent in local currency) depending on experience and subject to market rate adjustment. This role also carries a 10% annual bonus target.

We know our people are what make us great, and we're committed to taking great care of them. Our inclusive benefits package supports your well-being and growth, including 100% coverage of medical, dental, vision, mental health, and supplemental insurance premiums for you and your family. We also offer 16 weeks paid parental leave, unlimited PTO, stipends for remote work and wellness, a professional development budget, and more.

See full benefits here.

All final candidates will be asked to complete a background check and employment verifications as part of our pre-employment process.

Customer.io recognizes the stifling impact of systemic injustice on diverse communities. We commit to using our influence to increase inclusion and equity within the tech industry. We strive to build an inclusive team culture, implement bias-free hiring practices, and develop community partnerships to expand our global impact.

Voluntary Self-Identification

For government reporting purposes, we ask candidates to respond to the below self-identification survey.Completion of the form is entirely voluntary. Whatever your decision, it will not be considered in the hiringprocess or thereafter. Any information that you do provide will be recorded and maintained in aconfidential file.

As set forth in Customer.io’s Equal Employment Opportunity policy,we do not discriminate on the basis of any protected group status under any applicable law.

If you believe you belong to any of the categories of protected veterans listed below, please indicate by making the appropriate selection.As a government contractor subject to the Vietnam Era Veterans Readjustment Assistance Act (VEVRAA), we request this information in order to measurethe effectiveness of the outreach and positive recruitment efforts we undertake pursuant to VEVRAA. Classification of protected categoriesis as follows:

A "disabled veteran" is one of the following: a veteran of the U.S. military, ground, naval or air service who is entitled to compensation (or who but for the receipt of military retired pay would be entitled to compensation) under laws administered by the Secretary of Veterans Affairs; or a person who was discharged or released from active duty because of a service-connected disability.

A "recently separated veteran" means any veteran during the three-year period beginning on the date of such veteran's discharge or release from active duty in the U.S. military, ground, naval, or air service.

An "active duty wartime or campaign badge veteran" means a veteran who served on active duty in the U.S. military, ground, naval or air service during a war, or in a campaign or expedition for which a campaign badge has been authorized under the laws administered by the Department of Defense.

An "Armed forces service medal veteran" means a veteran who, while serving on active duty in the U.S. military, ground, naval or air service, participated in a United States military operation for which an Armed Forces service medal was awarded pursuant to Executive Order 12985.

We use Greenhouse's AI-powered Talent Matching tool to help assess your application against the role's requirements. AI informs but does not replace human decision-making in our hiring process.