Staff Backend Engineer

As a Staff Backend Engineer, you will be a highly technical individual contributor responsible for designing, building, and optimizing the backend systems that power our low-latency ad platform. You will take the lead in developing scalable microservices and streaming data infrastructure to handle high-throughput workloads with minimal latency. This role requires deep expertise in distributed systems and real-time data processing (ideally in the programmatic advertising domain) to ensure our systems remain highly performant and reliable. You’ll work closely with product managers, data scientists, and other engineering teams to translate business needs into technical solutions and ensure the platform is fast, fault-tolerant, and observable. This role is based in the United States and can be performed remotely, with a preference for candidates who can join us in a hybrid capacity in San Francisco, New York, or Atlanta. Responsibilities: System Architecture Development: Lead the design and implementation of scalable, high-performance backend services, including microservices and APIs, that can efficiently handle large volumes of requests with low latency. Ensure the architecture accommodates real-time bidding and personalization use cases common in AdTech. Streaming Data Infrastructure: Develop and maintain streaming data pipelines and event-driven systems to process and analyze continuous data flows in real time (e.g., using Apache Kafka). Optimize data ingestion and processing for timeliness and accuracy to support downstream analytics and machine-learning models. Performance Reliability: Ensure the backend systems are highly performant, resilient, and stable under heavy load. Implement robust fault-tolerance mechanisms and optimize for low-latency response times in a high-concurrency environment. Leverage observability best practices (comprehensive monitoring, logging, and tracing) to enable engineers to quickly analyze system behavior and take proactive measures to boost performance and reliability. Cross-Functional Collaboration: Work closely with cross-functional teams – including Product, Data Science, DevOps, and Frontend – to translate business requirements into scalable technical solutions. Facilitate effective communication and collaborative problem-solving to deliver new features and improvements that align with our product roadmap. Technical Leadership Mentorship: Provide technical leadership within the engineering team without direct managerial duties. Guide and mentor junior engineers through code reviews, design discussions, and best practice adoption, fostering a culture of technical excellence and continuous improvement. Technical Strategy Innovation: Stay abreast of emerging technologies and industry trends (e.g. new AWS services, streaming frameworks, database technologies) and evaluate their potential benefit to our platform. Contribute to the technical roadmap, making build-vs-buy recommendations and driving innovation to keep our systems ahead of the curve. Required Qualifications: 8+ years of software engineering experience building backend systems, with 3+ years in a senior or lead role (e.g. Staff Engineer, Principal Engineer) in the AdTech or a similar high-volume, low-latency domain. Proven track record in designing and building high-throughput, low-latency distributed systems that operate at scale (e.g. handling thousands of requests per second or more). Expertise in microservices architecture and distributed system design, including experience decomposing monoliths or building greenfield microservices with well-defined APIs. Proficiency in Java and Go for backend development, and experience with Python for scripting, automation, or data processing tasks. Hands-on experience with streaming data technologies and event-driven frameworks, such as Apache Kafka (or AWS Kinesis), and possibly stream processing frameworks (Spark Streaming, Flink, or similar, experience with Apache Kafka is high ... (truncated, view full listing at source)