Staff Backend Engineer

Staff Backend Engineer

📍 Location: San Francisco, CA — Hybrid (3 days/week in office)

💰 Compensation: $200K–$240K base + 10–12% annual bonus + competitive equity

🛂 Work authorization: Visa sponsorship available (including H-1B transfers with eligibility requirements)

⏳ Experience: 8+ years

About the company

We're partnering with a fast-growing, venture-backed consumer marketplace that's transforming how people buy, sell, and interact with high-value collectibles through a technology-first platform.

The company has built a highly scalable marketplace handling billions of monthly transactions while continuing to expand into new product categories. Backed by experienced founders and prominent industry leaders, they're building modern infrastructure to support rapid growth and an exceptional customer experience.

Highlights:

• Venture-backed, high-growth consumer marketplace

• Processing billions of transactions every month

• Expanding into multiple new marketplace categories

• Team of ~70 employees with significant runway for growth

• High-ownership engineering culture with strong product collaboration

About the role

We're looking for a Staff Backend Engineer to help architect and scale the core platform as the business continues its rapid expansion.

This is a hands-on technical leadership role for an experienced engineer who enjoys designing distributed systems, modernizing platform architecture, and leading large technical initiatives from concept through production. You'll work across greenfield development and platform modernization while partnering closely with infrastructure, product, and engineering teams.

What you'll do

• Design and scale container-based backend infrastructure to support rapidly growing transaction volume

• Build backend services that power new marketplace categories and customer experiences

• Lead the migration of monolithic applications into scalable microservices

• Own large engineering initiatives from architecture through production deployment

• Improve platform reliability through observability, monitoring, and scalability planning

• Partner closely with DevOps to optimize cloud infrastructure and production systems

• Leverage AI-powered development tools to improve engineering velocity and code quality

What we're looking for (must-haves)

• 8+ years of backend software engineering experience

• Proven experience designing and scaling high-volume production systems

• Strong system design and distributed systems expertise

• Experience building containerized applications and cloud-native infrastructure

• Hands-on experience leading large technical projects end to end

• Strong backend development skills using modern server-side technologies

• Experience working in fast-paced, consumer-facing product environments

• Comfortable adopting AI-assisted software development workflows

• Able to work hybrid in San Francisco (3 days/week)

Nice to have

• Experience scaling high-traffic marketplace or e-commerce platforms

• Deep knowledge of Kubernetes and container orchestration

• Experience migrating monolithic architectures to microservices

• Strong cloud infrastructure and DevOps collaboration experience

• Background building highly observable, resilient production systems

Tech stack

TypeScript, Node.js, PostgreSQL, Redis, AWS, Kubernetes (EKS), Docker, Terraform, BullMQ, Datadog, Sentry, LaunchDarkly, Stripe