Staff Backend Engineer (Python Postgres)

Responsibilities:
Write APIs are where the real complexity lies: think of payroll deductions, employee creation, benefits enrollment, and other critical workflows.
Every write API is part of a research project and part of a reliability problem.
The research half: the systems you'd be writing into are undocumented, inconsistent, and sometimes quietly wrong about their own behavior.
The reliability half: idempotency, retries, partial failures, reconciliation. When a payroll deduction is written twice, someone's salary is wrong.
We want one person accountable for this whole surface, end to end.
What the role is:
You'd write code most days that removes constraints for the rest of the team rather than closing tickets. Beyond your own work, you'd be the second opinion on hard design calls and the person engineers escalate to when they're stuck.
You'd also run the senior side of hiring and interviewing when required.
Your first six months:
Month 1 Onboard. Read the codebase. Understand before changing.
Months 2 - 3 Take the write API surface. Propose a plan, and start executing.
Month 4 Run the senior side of the interview loop.
Month 5 Ship 6 infrastructure works that hold up. Monthly on-call. Second voice on architecture decisions that span teams.
Requirements:
You've owned something end to end. Designed it, shipped it, ran it in production, and got paged when it broke. Not a component inside someone else's system. You'll be asked to walk through one in detail, and that conversation will matter more than your resume.
Real depth in Python Postgres/MySQL, not just fluency. FastAPI is a plus, not a requirement.
You've run systems under genuine load. Not Twitter/Facebook scale, but real customers losing real money when things break.
You've designed APIs other engineers build against and can explain what you chose against, not just what you chose.
You're steady when things are on fire. Most of the interesting failures here are quiet, partial, and found late.

Skills
backend, mysql, postgres, postgresql, python

Experience
5-8 yrs