Staff Engineer (Backend) - Platform

Overview

Staff Engineer (Backend) in the Platform team, setting the technical direction for the shared foundations every Ajaib product runs on: identity, core services, API standards, observability and developer tooling.

What you'll do

• Define the technical direction and architecture for platform systems that span many teams.
• Lead the design of scalable, secure, multi-tenant services and review critical designs from other teams.
• Set API and contract standards across the company: versioning, backward compatibility, deprecation and documentation.
• Lead the architecture of identity and access: authentication, authorization, token handling and service-to-service security.
• Design for reliability: service level objectives, rate limiting, isolation between consumers, graceful degradation and disaster recovery.
• Build the golden paths: service templates, shared libraries, CI/CD standards and observability defaults.
• Plan and lead large migrations across many teams, with clear timelines, tooling and support.
• Identify technical risks early, weigh trade-offs and drive decisions that fit business and regulatory needs.
• Lead investigations and root cause analysis for complex production incidents, and drive lasting improvements.
• Partner with Engineering Managers, Product, Security, Infrastructure and Architecture on cross-team initiatives.
• Mentor Senior Engineers and help grow technical leadership across the company.
• Stay hands-on with implementation for critical components and complex problems.

What you'll need

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science or equivalent practical experience.
• 8+ years of professional software engineering, with a proven record of designing and running platform or shared services used by many teams, and leading technical work across teams.
• Highly proficient in Java, Go or another modern backend language.
• Strong expertise in microservices, event-driven architectures, multi-tenant design, reliability engineering, observability and performance optimization.
• Deep knowledge of authentication and authorization (Keycloak / Ory Stack, OAuth2, OpenID Connect, JWT, mTLS) and secure system design.
• Deep practical experience with Kafka, Redis, and relational and NoSQL databases, including query tuning and data consistency.
• Experience designing and operating applications on cloud platforms (GCP, AWS) and Kubernetes.
• Product mindset toward internal users.
• Strong communication, with the ability to influence technical decisions without direct authority.

Nice to have

• Experience in fintech or another regulated environment.

Details

• Hybrid work arrangement: flexibility to work both remotely and from the office.