Staff Software Engineer, Core Everand

Accountabilities:: Set technical direction for the backend platform by creating and socializing design documents, leading architecture reviews, and translating ambiguous product requirements into concrete technical solutions. Design, build, and evolve scalable backend services supporting web and mobile experiences, discoverability, personalization, experimentation, and core content consumption. Own backend reliability and platform health across staging environments, CI/CD, databases, queues, infrastructure costs, observability, and operational performance. Establish and improve reliability practices, including service-level objectives, metrics, alerts, telemetry, and effective approaches to debugging distributed systems. Raise engineering standards through thoughtful code reviews, mentorship, pairing, knowledge sharing, and strong expectations around architecture, testing, security, and operations. Represent backend engineering in cross-team planning and serve as a technical connector across Engineering, Product, Design, Analytics, Web, Mobile, and ML teams. Drive modernization initiatives that simplify legacy systems, eliminate technical debt, improve scalability, and increase engineering velocity. Partner with data and ML teams to develop backend capabilities supporting recommendations, personalization, experimentation, and consistent data experiences across platforms. Use metrics, analytics, and telemetry to identify trends, investigate anomalies, and inform technical priorities and product decisions. Contribute to architecture review groups and cross-team technical initiatives that strengthen engineering practices and organizational standards. Champion a user-first approach, ensuring backend architecture and technical decisions ultimately improve the reading and listening experience. Foster a culture of technical excellence, continuous improvement, collaboration, and responsible engineering decision-making. Requirements: Significant professional experience in backend software engineering, with a proven record of designing, building, and scaling distributed systems. Strong programming skills in at least one modern backend language such as Ruby, Scala, Go, or Python, with Ruby experience particularly valued. Deep understanding of distributed systems, backend architecture, scalable service design, and production engineering. Strong knowledge of reliability and observability practices, including SLOs, metrics, alerting, telemetry, and distributed-system debugging. Demonstrated technical leadership experience, including setting architectural direction, mentoring engineers, and leading large-scale migrations or modernization initiatives. Ability to write clean, maintainable, secure, and scalable production code. Strong ability to transform ambiguous product requirements into clear technical designs and actionable engineering plans. Excellent cross-functional communication skills and the ability to collaborate confidently with senior Product, Design, Analytics, ML, Web, and Mobile stakeholders. Collaborative leadership style focused on achieving the best technical and customer outcome rather than individual ownership of ideas. Passion for mentoring, knowledge sharing, architecture discussions, and raising engineering standards across teams. Strong user empathy and the ability to connect technical decisions with meaningful improvements to customer experiences. Nice to have: Strong coding experience in Ruby. Nice to have: Experience improving reliability, latency, or throughput in large-scale distributed systems. Nice to have: Experience working with ML teams on recommendation, personalization, or feed systems. Nice to have: Familiarity with experimentation and feature-flagging platforms. Benefits: Competitive U.S. base salary ranging from approximately $141,000 to $242,000 annually outside California, depending on geographic market and individual qualifications. California salary range of approximately $171,000 to $255,000 annually , depending on geographic market and individual qualifications. Competitive equity ownership opportunity as part of the total compensation package. Comprehensive health, dental, and vision coverage. Mental health support and disability coverage. Flexible remote work model designed to balance individual autonomy with meaningful community connection. Generous paid time off, including vacation, sick time, holidays, winter break, volunteer time, and sabbaticals. Paid parental leave and family support benefits. Retirement matching and employee equity programs. Learning and development programs supporting ongoing professional growth. Wellness and home-office stipends. Complimentary access to the company's suite of digital products. Enterprise access to leading AI tools. Opportunities for intentional in-person gatherings, team connection, and collaboration. Inclusive culture that values diverse perspectives, technical excellence, experimentation, and continuous improvement. Interview accommodations available for candidates who require reasonable adjustments.