Staff Backend Engineer - Adaptive Telemetry, Databases | USA | Remote
RemoteUnited States
Job Summary
Drive technical strategy and roadmap for adaptive telemetry solutions, owning architecture, reliability, performance, and cost for critical distributed systems. Lead end-to-end delivery of large, cross-functional initiatives spanning planning, design, execution, and long-term operation. Define SLOs/SLIs, lead high-severity incident response, and champion automation to reduce toil and lower MTTR. Mentor senior and mid-level engineers while aligning stakeholders across Product, Design, and other teams to remove blockers. Represent engineering internally and externally, communicating technical vision to non-engineering audiences. Utilize modern AI coding assistants and frontier models to accelerate prototyping and refactoring within security guidelines.
Required Qualifications
- Proven delivery of large distributed systems
- Experience shipping and operating complex systems that span multiple teams
- Evidence of technical leadership and impact
- Strong systems-design instincts
- Deep understanding of tradeoffs around latency, consistency, availability, scaling and cost
- Solid experience with cloud-native architectures (microservices, containers/Kubernetes, IaC)
- Operational practices that keep them healthy
- Comfortable defining SLOs/SLIs
- Doing capacity planning
- Tuning performance
- Driving reliability work end-to-end
- Excellent coding and design skills
- Write clear, maintainable, well-tested code
- Lead technical designs
- Go
- Python/C/C++/Rust or similar
- Comfort with AI-assisted development
- Curious and comfortable using AI-powered developer tools
- Ideally have practical experience folding them into a team's workflow
- Familiarity with streaming/messaging systems (e.g., Kafka)
- Observability tooling (Prometheus/Grafana or equivalents)
- Ability to align cross-functional stakeholders
- Set priorities and drive outcomes in a remote-first environment
- Clear written and verbal communication
- Works across engineers and non-technical stakeholders
- USA time zones
Desired Qualifications
- Motivated self starter with a bias towards action
- Customer focused
- Passion for creating intuitive products that fit customers' needs
- Influence without authority
- Clear written and verbal communication that works across engineers and non-technical stakeholders
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