Staff Backend Engineer

Overview

Staff Software Engineer to own and drive the highest-leverage technical work across Blitzy's backend platform, infrastructure, and AI product surface, reporting directly to the CTO. This is a hands-on technical role.

What you'll do

• Own the architecture and technical roadmap for one or more core areas of the platform, balancing speed, quality, security, and scalability
• Write, review, and ship production code that drives meaningful customer and business outcomes, while shaping how the rest of the team writes and reviews code
• Leverage Generative AI tools daily to improve the quality, speed, and effectiveness of both technical and non-technical work, and help others on the team do the same
• Serve as a technical escalation point for complex production issues, driving postmortems and fixes that prevent them from recurring
• Champion improvements across the enterprise software development lifecycle, advocating for better ways of building, deploying, and operating software company-wide
• Build demos, prototypes, examples, and technical content that create technical champions and help customers and colleagues adopt new technologies
• Collaborate closely with engineers, designers, sales executives, and other stakeholders to deliver exceptional outcomes in an in-person environment
• Communicate openly, share the rationale behind important technical decisions, and actively seek feedback to keep the team aligned and moving forward
• Mentor and unblock other engineers, modeling the technical judgment we want the whole team to have
• Proactively surface and resolve systemic issues, such as technical debt, reliability gaps, or process bottlenecks, before they become blockers

What you'll need

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, including direct experience with Python, Terraform, and AWS
• Demonstrated track record of leading technical initiatives and driving architectural decisions across multiple systems or teams, without formal people-management authority
• Proficiency in backend frameworks and technologies such as Node.js, NuxtJS, Express.js, or Python
• Experience with cloud platforms including AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, or Vercel
• Strong knowledge of programming languages such as Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, Java, C++, or Go
• Hands-on knowledge of RPC technologies and API architectures including REST, gRPC, or GraphQL
• Experience with relational and NoSQL databases such as SQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, or Firebase
• Familiarity with CI/CD tools including Jenkins, CircleCI, GitLab, or similar platforms
• Experience with source code versioning tools such as Git or Perforce
• Deep knowledge of microservices architecture and distributed application design at scale
• Familiarity with AI platforms including OpenAI, Anthropic, Hugging Face, Vertex AI, Amazon Bedrock, or SageMaker
• Demonstrated ability to build and scale enterprise-grade applications with 99%+ service-level availability
• Advanced proficiency in Python, Kubernetes, Terraform, and GCP

Nice to have

• Experience building platforms or tools used by other engineering teams, not just end customers
• Experience operating as a de facto technical lead, setting direction for other engineers without needing the title to do it
• Track record of turning ambiguous, underspecified problems into clear technical plans
• Experience mentoring or informally coaching other engineers

Details

• Reports directly to the CTO
• In-person collaboration