Staff Backend Engineer – Search Features, APIs

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in United States.

📋 Description

• Take charge of the technical direction for one or more services, focusing on architecture, performance, and reliability.

• Spearhead the design of new systems and public APIs while enhancing existing ones as traffic and feature requirements expand.

• Elevate engineering standards through thorough design and code reviews.

• Guide mid and senior engineers in taking on larger responsibilities.

• Collaborate with product and engineering teams, as well as solutions/support, to influence what is developed and to communicate search limitations and trade-offs transparently.

• Engage in on-call duties for the systems you oversee.

• Lead incident response efforts and ensure follow-through when systems encounter issues.

⛳️ Requirements

• Significant experience in building and managing high-traffic, low-latency backend services in a production environment.

• Comprehensive knowledge of Python.

• Experience with observability and performance optimization in live systems.

• Proven ability in designing and evolving public APIs relied upon by external customers.

• Experience in architecting and implementing scalable service-oriented architectures.

• Demonstrated history of leading projects that involve multiple engineers over several quarters.

• Ability to influence without direct authority and openness to adjusting positions when presented with stronger arguments.

• Strong written communication skills, including the ability to create design documents, RFCs, and postmortems.

• Good judgment in evaluating trade-offs and project scope.

• Comfort with uncertainty and loosely defined challenges.

• Sense of ownership that extends beyond code merges to the behavior of the system in production.

• Nice to have: Experience with AWS.

• Nice to have: Background in search, ranking, information retrieval, or e-commerce product discovery.

• Nice to have: Familiarity with AI/LLM-facing infrastructure, including MCP or agent tooling.

🏝️ Benefits

• Unlimited vacation time; employees are strongly encouraged to take at least 3 weeks each year.

• Fully remote team; choose your living location.

• Stipend for home office setup.

• Apple laptops provided for new hires.

• Annual training and development budget for every employee, refreshed each year.

• Maternity and paternity leave for eligible employees.

• Collaborate with intelligent colleagues who will support your growth and enable you to make a meaningful impact.

• Stock options available in addition to the base salary.

• Regular team offsites to foster connection and collaboration.