Staff Software Engineer - Backend

Overview

Staff Software Engineer (Backend) providing technical leadership and domain ownership across critical backend services for SurveyMonkey's platform, shaping architecture and engineering direction across multiple initiatives.

What you'll do

• Architect, build, and maintain scalable backend services across multiple data regions, ensuring reliability, performance, and long-term maintainability.
• Provide technical domain ownership for a suite of services supporting one or more SurveyMonkey subsystems, driving architectural direction and technical decisions.
• Own technical requirements and feature delivery end-to-end, including authoring, reviewing, and approving requirements and technical specifications across multiple concurrent projects.
• Develop high-quality, readable, and extensible backend code while establishing and promoting software engineering best practices that enable teams to move quickly.
• Identify and implement effective processes, measurement solutions, and external technologies within the engineering function, developing recommendations and adoption strategies.
• Partner with product and technology leaders as a technical planning advisor, evaluating opportunities and making recommendations with return on investment in mind.
• Investigate and solve complex algorithmic and optimization challenges, serving as a recognized technical expert and resource across the engineering function.
• Foster a culture of collaboration, knowledge sharing, rigorous code reviews, and testing, while mentoring engineers on effectively leveraging modern AI development tools such as Claude Code, Cursor, and GitHub Copilot.
• Establish standards for reviewing AI-generated code to maintain quality and engineering rigor.

What you'll need

• 12+ years of professional experience in SaaS and web application development, primarily focused on backend engineering, including leading large-scale, cross-functional projects.
• Deep expertise in architecting and building scalable, high-performance backend services and APIs, with proficiency in frameworks such as FastAPI, Flask, Django, Spring Boot, or Node.js.
• Strong understanding of software design patterns, ORM frameworks, and SQL/NoSQL databases.
• Experience designing distributed systems, including asynchronous messaging, event-driven architectures, and distributed streaming technologies.
• Experience building and scaling cloud-native applications using AWS.
• Hands-on experience with AI-assisted development tools and workflows (e.g., Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot), as well as integrating AI models, LLM frameworks, and automated workflows into backend architectures.
• Demonstrated technical leadership in driving architectural decisions, influencing engineering strategy, and using data and business impact to guide technical priorities.

Nice to have

• Experience with Elasticsearch is a plus.

Details

• Location: Bengaluru, India (SurveyMonkey office).
• Hybrid: work from the SurveyMonkey office in Bengaluru 3 days per week.