Staff Engineer - Backend (Level4)

As a Staff Backend Engineer, you'll drive the design and development of scalable distributed systems, working on high-impact backend services. Beyond writing code, you'll be expected to identify problems before they're assigned to you, make independent calls on ambiguous technical trade-offs, and influence how your team and adjacent teams build software. You'll combine hands-on coding, system design, and technical leadership, owning outcomes, not just deliverables, and helping shape engineering practices beyond your immediate scope.
Responsibilities:
Design and build scalable distributed systems and microservices.
Lead development of complex features and technical initiatives end-to-end.
Drive system design, API design, and engineering best practices.
Own scalability, performance, reliability, and fault tolerance of services.
Optimise high-throughput, low-latency systems.
Proactively identify gaps, risks, or improvement opportunities beyond your assigned scope, and drive them to resolution without waiting to be asked.
Make independent architectural and technical trade-off decisions, and be accountable for the outcomes.
Contribute to cross-team collaboration and system alignment; influence engineering standards and practices beyond your immediate team.
Partner with product and business stakeholders to translate business needs into technical priorities, and technical constraints into business context.
Stay hands-on with coding and system design.
Mentor engineers with a structured approach, supporting overall team capability growth.
Participate in technical decision-making and architectural improvements.
Handle production issues, RCA, and drive continuous improvement.
Requirements:
8-12 years of backend engineering experience.
Strong experience building distributed systems at scale.
Expertise in: Java, Kotlin, Scala, or Go.
Strong understanding of microservices architecture, REST APIs & system design, SQL/NoSQL databases, and performance, scalability, and concurrency
Strong coding and problem-solving ability.
Beyond the technical bar:
A track record of taking ownership beyond your assigned scope initiatives you drove because you saw the need, not because you were told.
Comfort making decisions under ambiguity and owning the consequences, technical and business.
Experience communicating trade-offs to both engineers and non-technical stakeholders, adjusting your framing accordingly.
Demonstrated impact mentoring or growing other engineers, with concrete outcomes, not just informal help.
Nice to Have:
Experience building large-scale consumer or marketplace platforms.
Exposure to event-driven systems (Kafka, RabbitMQ).
Experience with NoSQL databases (Cassandra, MongoDB, Aerospike).
Familiarity with cloud (AWS/GCP), CI/CD pipelines.
Experience working in Agile/Scrum environments.

Experience
8-12 yrs