Staff Engineer

<div class="content-intro"><p class="p1">HackerRank helps thousands of companies like NVIDIA<strong> </strong>and<strong> </strong>Amazon hire developers based on their skills vs. pedigree, and also nurtures a community of millions of developers to upskill themselves to become next-gen developers.</p> <p class="p1">The people at HackerRank care deeply about their work and have an extremely intense work ethic. In many companies, speed & quality is a tradeoff. At HackerRank, it’s not -- we expect you to ship in about half the time that most competent people think is possible while maintaining a standard of quality you’d proudly sign your name on. The only way to make this happen is if you truly love your craft and are deeply committed to growth.</p></div><p><strong>About the role</strong></p> <p>This is a senior IC role for a backend specialist who can alternate between two operating modes: (1) shaping platforms that many product teams build on, and (2) diving deep with a team to crack a hard, high-stakes technical problem. You will also build AI-native capabilities into our platform (LLM orchestration, evaluation, cost and latency controls, guardrails), build novel systems, and raise the reliability, performance, and developer experience across services.</p> <p>You will partner across multiple product groups, write crisp technical strategy, and be the engineer others look to for judgment, taste, and depth.</p> <p><strong>What you’ll do</strong></p> <ul> <li>Align engineering roadmap with business outcomes. Translate company goals and customer needs into a technical roadmap. Communicate trade-offs and decisions in plain language</li> <li>Design and evolve core platforms for APIs, data, and AI that are scalable, observable, secure, and cost-aware ( thousands of concurrent assistant sessions, bursty traffic).</li> <li>Embed AI as a first-class concern: request orchestration, evaluation harnesses, guardrails and safety, prompt and data governance.</li> <li>Partner to deliver impact: Work with product managers and, when needed, customer-facing teams to drive impact.</li> <li>Mentor: raise the bar through reviews, design reviews, and hands-on pairing; be a model others emulate.</li> </ul> <p><strong>Who you are</strong></p> <ul> <li>Backend/platform engineer with over 8 years of experience building and operating production-grade services with clear ownership of outcomes.</li> <li>Strong in system design and distributed systems, with hands-on experience across cloud platforms (AWS/GCP), containers & Kubernetes, Infrastructure as Code (Terraform), and CI/CD automation.</li> <li>Depth in one or more of Go, Java, Ruby, Python, or JavaScript, and ability to quickly learn new languages and frameworks.</li> <li>Proficient with Postgres/MySQL and NoSQL databases, and experienced in event-driven architectures using Kafka or similar for streaming and async </li> <li>Excellent communicator who writes clear documentation, explains trade-offs simply, mentors peers, and influences across teams without direct authority.</li> </ul> <p><strong>Even better if you have</strong></p> <ul> <li>Exposure to AI systems in production such as LLM gateways, prompt or model evaluation and  guardrails.</li> <li>Experience improving developer experience across the company.</li> <li>Public artifacts such as design write-ups, talks, or OSS contributions.</li> </ul> <p><strong>You’ll thrive in this role if</strong></p> <ul> <li>You communicate with clarity and empathy, engaging both tec ... (truncated, view full listing at source)