Staff Backend Engineer (Application Infra)

Role Overview

We are looking for a visionary Staff Software Engineer to lead the architectural design and implementation of our next-generation durable execution platform. This team is tasked with building a highly scalable, fault-tolerant system from scratch that enables developers to write long-running, reliable workflows as code.

What You Will Do

• Architect from Zero: Lead the end-to-end design of a distributed workflow engine. You will Build the Best Team and Help Them Grow by setting the gold standard for architectural integrity and high-performance code.
• Define Extreme Availability: Design for "5-6 nines" (99.9999% availability). You will Dive Deep into the tail latencies and edge cases of distributed state management to ensure our platform is always on for our customers.
• AI-Driven Automation: Integrate AI/ML models to automate system functionality, including predictive scaling, automated bottleneck detection, and intelligent error recovery, ensuring we Wow the Customer through seamless platform performance and availability.
• Solve Hard Problems: Address challenges related to distributed locking, timers, and deterministic execution. You must Be Data-Driven to validate architectural decisions against massive traffic patterns.
• Lead with Influence: As a Staff Engineer, you will Influence without Authority, collaborating across the organization to ensure this platform becomes the backbone of our global operations.

Basic Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, Electrical Engineering, Math, or a closely related field
• 6 years of experience in backend software development
• Proficiency in Java and the Spring Framework
• Experience working in cloud environments, particularly AWS

Preferred Qualifications

• Extensive Experience: 10+ years of professional software development experience, specifically building backend infrastructure that supports global-scale traffic
• High Availability Mastery: Proven track record of managing and maintaining systems with 5-6 nines of availability. You understand that "good enough" isn't enough; we Focus on the Customer and the Experience by ensuring zero downtime
• Distributed Systems Expert: Deep expertise in designing and deploying mission-critical systems (e.g., databases, messaging queues, or orchestration engines) from the ground up
• Technical Mastery: Expert-level proficiency in Java, Python with deep understanding of concurrency and memory management
• AI Integration: Experience or a strong architectural vision for using AI/ML to automate system-level functionality and operational tasks
• Specialized Knowledge: Deep familiarity with the Temporal or Cadence programming models and their underlying architecture. Experience in Kubernetes and containerization
• Stateful Database Experience: Experience with Cassandra and TiDB preferred
• Open Source Leadership: Experience contributing to major open-source distributed systems projects
• Observability Expert: Expertise in building highly observable systems using distributed tracing and advanced telemetry to proactively identify issues