Staff Engineer - Backend & Distributed Systems (AWS)

Job Responsibilities

DATA MODEL & PLATFORM ARCHITECTURE

• Own the canonical data models and service boundaries in your domain
• Design models and boundaries that let independent systems evolve in parallel without duplicating logic or creating competing implementations
• Evolve the platform through additive, backward-compatible changes that introduce new capabilities without disrupting existing behavior
• Own the architecture of one or more critical platform domains, with responsibility for design integrity, scalability, reliability, security, and long-term technical health

DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS & CLOUD ARCHITECTURE (AWS)

• Design AWS-native, event-driven and asynchronous services that scale on demand, degrade gracefully under load, and remain cost-efficient as volume grows
• Architect the backend to enable and support AI/ML workloads at scale with a focus on performance, scalability, and cost efficiency
• Act as architectural steward for these services, keeping them scalable, resilient, secure, and maintainable as customer and platform demands grow
• Drive cloud-native design principles: stateless services, managed-service adoption, and failure-tolerant, self-healing architectures

SECURITY & MULTI-TENANCY

• Treat tenant isolation, authentication, and authorization as first-class design concerns across every service and API you own
• Design secure authentication and token-handling flows, permission-aware data access, and safe credential management for an enterprise, multi-tenant platform
• Design for correct, isolated behavior across tenant, environment, and data-residency boundaries, and reason explicitly about security posture and blast radius when centralizing sensitive capabilities

TECHNICAL LEADERSHIP & CROSS-FUNCTIONAL INFLUENCE

• Partner with product- and engineering leaders to develop a deep understanding of customer and business needs and translate them into platform architectures that solve the problem
• Lead the technical design of major platform initiatives end to end, and drive alignment across teams and functions whose priorities and incentives do not always converge
• Integrate diverse stakeholders and project teams around a shared technical direction, navigating differing functional interests with sound judgment and strong interpersonal skill
• Produce clear, rigorous design documents, service contracts, and acceptance criteria that others can review, build on, and trust, setting the standard for technical design on the team
• Use AI-assisted tools to accelerate and sharpen design and implementation, applying judgment to know where they add leverage and where deeper thinking is required
• Lead by example in applying AI-assisted engineering tools to accelerate architecture, design, implementation, and testing, using sound technical judgment to amplify productivity without compromising quality, maintainability, or depth of thinking

API DESIGN

• Design clean, versioned API contracts on top of the platform's data models — including high-scale bulk and asynchronous operations — with deterministic behavior, idempotency, structured error handling, and well-defined limits
• Establish contract tests and permission-enforcement validation as first-class parts of every API you design

DELIVERY & ENGINEERING EXCELLENCE

• Own initiatives end to end from design through release, with accountability for product quality in your domain and high standards for reliability, security, observability, performance, scalability, usability, and cost across the services you own
• Champion modern practices: infrastructure-as-code, automated testing, continuous delivery, and observability-by-default
• Lead platform-modernization and refactoring initiatives while maintaining delivery velocity and improve the developer experience for the services you own
• Identify and drive improvements to how the engineering organization designs and delivers
• Contribute across the stack when an initiative calls for it, including UI layers on top of the platform services you build; backend remains the primary focus

ORGANIZATIONAL IMPACT & MENTORSHIP

• Serve as a technical multiplier unblocking teams, accelerating architectural decisions, and reducing long-term complexity
• Partner with CloudOps, Security, MLOps, and integration teams to define reliability targets, operational-readiness standards, and clean interfaces between domains
• Mentor senior and mid-level engineers, raising the bar for data-model and systems design, security, and design-document quality
• Stay ahead of a fast-moving industry, particularly the rapid evolution of AI capabilities, and drive pragmatic adoption where it delivers clear business value
• Other duties as assigned

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's and/or master's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Software or Electrical/Electronics Engineering, or a comparable field
• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, including 2+ years at staff level
• Demonstrated leadership of architecture decisions spanning multiple teams with concrete examples of driving cross-team technical direction to a decision
• Proven ability to drive technical outcomes across diverse stakeholders and teams that report into different functions, aligning divergent interests without direct authority
• Track record of owning significant initiatives end to end, including release ownership
• Strong proficiency in Python (working experience in Java a plus), building backend and cloud-based services
• Deep experience designing, building, and operating scalable, enterprise-grade distributed systems on AWS
• Strong data-modeling and service-architecture skills, with a track record of building durable, reusable abstractions that other teams adopt and extend without rework
• Experience designing backend systems that enable demanding workloads with high-throughput data pipelines, asynchronous processing, or ML/inference services at scale and with cost-efficiency
• Solid grounding in application security and multi-tenancy: authentication/authorization, token handling, tenant isolation, and permission-aware data access
• Experience designing high-scale API contracts
• Strong experience with infrastructure-as-code and CI/CD for cloud services
• Strong understanding of observability in distributed systems: logging, metrics, tracing, and alerting
• A demonstrated habit of staying current with rapidly evolving AI capabilities and integrating them into how you work and design
• Excellent written and verbal communication in English

Preferred Qualifications

Additional Experience (a plus)

• Building services that support AI/ML product features and data pipelines
• Integrating third-party SaaS platforms and connectors with attention to security and reliability
• Search and retrieval systems
• Domain familiarity with CLM, contracts, or comparable enterprise B2B platforms