Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Communications Platform)
$185,500–$299,000 year
HybridNew York City, New York, United States
Job Summary
Drive the architecture, design, and implementation of the Communications Platform's Email Delivery, In-Product Notifications, and Push Notifications services. Define technical strategy for platform modernization, reliability hardening, and engineering standards across backend services while writing high-quality Java code. Provide hands-on leadership through design and code reviews, mentor team members on system design, and proactively address systemic risks in performance, security, and operability. Balance short-term delivery with long-term health by communicating tradeoffs to stakeholders. Serve as a key technical partner on cross-team architecture initiatives.
Required Qualifications
- 10+ years of backend engineering experience
- significant time building and operating large-scale, customer-facing systems
- Deep expertise in Java and backend service development
- experience with APIs
- experience with async processing
- experience with messaging systems
- experience with data stores
- Strong experience with distributed systems in production
- experience with reliability
- experience with scaling
- experience with failure modes
- experience with observability
- A proven track record of technical leadership at the Staff or Senior-plus level
- influencing architecture across multiple teams or services
- Experience evolving existing systems
- modernizing legacy platforms
- simplifying complexity
- strengthening reliability
- Experience operating within platform engineering contexts
- quality of APIs and abstractions directly shapes their velocity
Desired Qualifications
- A strong understanding of multi-channel communication infrastructure (email delivery, push, in-product notifications)
- The ability to communicate complex technical concepts clearly to both technical and non-technical partners
- A mindset oriented toward mentorship, collaboration, and inclusive technical leadership
- Java
- Spring
- Kafka
- MongoDB
- CockroachDB
- Kubernetes
- GCP
- Claude Code
- Cursor
- GitHub Copilot
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