About the company
This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Staff Software Engineer, Core Everand based in the United States.
This is a senior technical leadership role focused on shaping the backend platform behind a growing digital reading and listening experience. You will define technical direction and build scalable distributed systems that power discoverability, personalization, experimentation, and core user journeys. The role combines hands-on backend engineering with architecture, reliability, mentorship, and cross-functional leadership.
Responsibilities
- Set technical direction for the backend platform by creating and socializing design documents, leading architecture reviews, and translating ambiguous product requirements into concrete technical solutions.
- Design, build, and evolve scalable backend services supporting web and mobile experiences, discoverability, personalization, experimentation, and core content consumption.
- Own backend reliability and platform health across staging environments, CI/CD, databases, queues, infrastructure costs, observability, and operational performance.
- Establish and improve reliability practices, including service-level objectives, metrics, alerts, telemetry, and effective approaches to debugging distributed systems.
- Raise engineering standards through thoughtful code reviews, mentorship, pairing, knowledge sharing, and strong expectations around architecture, testing, security, and operations.
- Represent backend engineering in cross-team planning and serve as a technical connector across Engineering, Product, Design, Analytics, Web, Mobile, and ML teams.
- Drive modernization initiatives that simplify legacy systems, eliminate technical debt, improve scalability, and increase engineering velocity.
- Partner with data and ML teams to develop backend capabilities supporting recommendations, personalization, experimentation, and consistent data experiences across platforms.
- Use metrics, analytics, and telemetry to identify trends, investigate anomalies, and inform technical priorities and product decisions.
- Contribute to architecture review groups and cross-team technical initiatives that strengthen engineering practices and organizational standards.
- Champion a user-first approach, ensuring backend architecture and technical decisions ultimately improve the reading and listening experience.
- Foster a culture of technical excellence, continuous improvement, collaboration, and responsible engineering decision-making.
Requirements
- Significant professional experience in backend software engineering, with a proven record of designing, building, and scaling distributed systems.
- Strong programming skills in at least one modern backend language such as Ruby, Scala, Go, or Python, with Ruby experience particularly valued.
- Deep understanding of distributed systems, backend architecture, scalable service design, and production engineering.
- Strong knowledge of reliability and observability practices, including SLOs, metrics, alerting, telemetry, and distributed-system debugging.
- Demonstrated technical leadership experience, including setting architectural direction, mentoring engineers, and leading large-scale migrations or modernization initiatives.
- Ability to write clean, maintainable, secure, and scalable production code.
- Strong ability to transform ambiguous product requirements into clear technical designs and actionable engineering plans.
- Excellent cross-functional communication skills and the ability to collaborate confidently with senior Product, Design, Analytics, ML, Web, and Mobile stakeholders.
- Collaborative leadership style focused on achieving the best technical and customer outcome rather than individual ownership of ideas.
- Passion for mentoring, knowledge sharing, architecture discussions, and raising engineering standards across teams.
- Strong user empathy and the ability to connect technical decisions with meaningful improvements to customer experiences.
Nice to have:
- Strong coding experience in Ruby.
- Experience improving reliability, latency, or throughput in large-scale distributed systems.
- Experience working with ML teams on recommendation, personalization, or feed systems.
- Familiarity with experimentation and feature-flagging platforms.
Conditions
- Competitive U.S. base salary ranging from approximately $141,000 to $242,000 annually outside California, depending on geographic market and individual qualifications.
- California salary range of approximately $171,000 to $255,000 annually, depending on geographic market and individual qualifications.
- Competitive equity ownership opportunity as part of the total compensation package.
- Comprehensive health, dental, and vision coverage.
- Mental health support and disability coverage.
- Flexible remote work model designed to balance individual autonomy with meaningful community connection.
- Generous paid time off, including vacation, sick time, holidays, winter break, volunteer time, and sabbaticals.
- Paid parental leave and family support benefits.
- Retirement matching and employee equity programs.
- Learning and development programs supporting ongoing professional growth.