Staff Backend Software Engineer

Join Stream as a Staff Backend Software Engineer and take ownership of backend systems that support thousands of developers. This individual contributor role involves hands-on coding and database management, with a focus on scalability and impact. You'll work with a variety of technologies, including Go, gRPC, PostgreSQL, and Kubernetes. Enjoy a range of benefits, including stock options, health coverage, and a monthly fitness stipend.

We’re also hiring Senior Engineers on these teams. If your experience fits Senior better than Staff, we’ll say so openly and talk it through with you

You’ve built backend systems at high scale and stayed long enough to live with your own decisions, good and bad. You care about how a system is structured, not only the next feature, and you can explain your trade-offs to the people who’ll live with them. Maybe you led a team for a few years and chose to go back to hands-on work

Comfort with infrastructure and database work as part of your normal week, including Kubernetes

Don’t worry if you haven’t used every tool we run. You’ll get exposure to most of them, and you’re welcome to convince us to add your favorites

Responsibilities

• Conception, development, and maintenance of backend systems that support high-scale applications.
• Writing code and directly interacting with databases to implement features and improvements.
• Taking ownership of a meaningful area within the backend systems, including shipping to production in your first weeks.
• Experience building features used by a large number of users, and scaling them as usage grows
• Experience building public APIs or SDKs that other developers use

Requirements

• Extensive backend engineering experience, including technical leadership on systems in production
• Proficiency in Go, Python, or in another backend language plus the willingness to switch to Go
• Hands-on experience with Redis or a similar in-memory data store
• Strong experience with a relational database. We use PostgreSQL, but any relational database counts
• Good written and spoken English. It’s our working language
• PostgreSQL in production at scale, including sharding, partitioning or large migrations
• Experience improving or redesigning legacy parts of a system that’s serving live traffic
• Go and gRPC in production at high request rates
• Messaging, feeds or other real-time systems, or message queues such as RabbitMQ or Kafka
• Distributed storage internals, such as Raft or RocksDB

Preferred

• Experience running workloads on GCP or AWS

Benefits

• You’ve cut infrastructure cost at a company where margins mattered