Staff Engineer

At Plume, we believe that technology isn't about moving faster, it's about making life's moments better. We've built the world's first open and hardware-independent service delivery platform for smart homes, small businesses, enterprises, and beyond. Our SaaS platform uses WiFi, advanced AI, and machine learning to create the future of connected spaces at massive scale. We deliver services to over 60 million locations globally and have managed over 3 billion devices on our platform. Our customers include many of the world's largest Internet Service Providers (ISPs) who rely on Plume to evolve their smart home offerings and glean insights from their data.

About the role

As part of our Connectivity Services team within Product Engineering, you will play a critical role in architecting and building highly scalable, high-performance backend systems that power our connectivity services products. This is a Staff, Individual Contributor role based in the US (East Coast/Midwest preferred) and spans full-stack backend engineering, including microservices, APIs, real-time and batch data pipelines, and distributed cloud architecture.

Responsibilities

• Architect and build large-scale cloud-distributed systems including microservices, streaming and batch data pipelines, and databases operating at scale (tens of millions of locations).
• Design, implement, and maintain RESTful and gRPC APIs powering internal and external applications.
• Architect and deploy scalable microservices on AWS and GCP using Kubernetes and modern DevOps practices.
• Build both real-time/streaming and offline/batch data pipelines, ensuring data accuracy, performance, and observability.
• Build Machine Learning pipelines to produce actionable insights that feed into algorithms and Agentic software.
• Support and maintain the existing production stack while contributing to and shaping new cloud architecture.
• Technically lead and mentor a small team, guiding junior engineers on architecture and implementation.
• Collaborate with cross-functional squad members and peer staff/senior engineers to deliver features end-to-end, from concept to production.
• Optimize services for scalability, resilience, and high availability.
• Contribute to architecture discussions, enforce coding standards, and drive best practices in CI/CD, testing, and monitoring.
• Embed security and compliance into backend systems and data workflows.

Requirements

• 5–8 years of professional software engineering experience.
• Proven, hands-on experience building and operating large-scale cloud-distributed systems.
• Strong proficiency in Go and Python.
• Demonstrated experience technically leading a small team and mentoring junior engineers on architecture and implementation.
• Strong communication skills.
• Proven experience with distributed systems, microservices, and event-driven architectures.
• Fundamental understanding of computer networking (including Wi-Fi), operating systems, and databases.
• Hands-on expertise in AWS (primary cloud) and container orchestration (Kubernetes, Docker); GCP experience a plus.
• Experience with real-time streaming (Kafka/Pulsar) and batch data pipeline frameworks (e.g., Spark).
• Experience with SQL and NoSQL databases (e.g., PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Cassandra, DynamoDB).
• Solid knowledge of CI/CD pipelines, testing frameworks, and observability tools (Grafana, Prometheus, ELK).
• Comfortable in a fully remote, globally distributed team with daily overlap across geographies.
• Strong problem-solving skills and ability to thrive in an agile, squad-based environment focused on technical/architectural decision-making.

Nice to Have

• Scala experience (legacy stack).
• Experience with caching layers, distributed storage, and message queues.
• Familiarity with AI-powered developer tools such as ChatGPT, Claude, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, or similar.
• Contributions to open-source projects or personal projects showcasing backend innovation.

Pay

Total compensation package includes an anticipated base compensation range of $150,000 – $170,000, plus up to 15% bonus, equity, and benefits.

Benefits

• 401k plan with company match.
• Basic life insurance.
• Comprehensive health, dental, vision, and other benefits and perks.