Staff Backend Engineer

Staff Backend Engineer (API & Distributed Systems)

Location: New York City (4 days onsite per week)

Pay: $250,000 Base + Equity

No Sponsorship Offered

About the Opportunity

A high-growth technology company is seeking a Staff Backend Engineer to lead the architecture and development of a business-critical external platform powering partner integrations, booking workflows, inventory management, and transactional systems.

This is a senior individual contributor position for an engineer with deep technical expertise who wants to own large-scale architectural decisions while remaining hands-on with development. The role combines API strategy, distributed systems design, data modeling, and technical leadership across multiple engineering teams.

Responsibilities

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• Lead the architecture, design, and development of externally facing APIs and platform services.
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• Drive technical strategy and establish engineering standards for partner integrations and transactional workflows.
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• Design highly reliable systems supporting reservations, inventory, pricing, booking, and order management processes.
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• Make foundational data modeling and domain architecture decisions across multiple products.
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• Partner with senior engineering leadership on long-term platform scalability and reliability initiatives.
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• Mentor engineers and influence technical direction without direct people management responsibilities.
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• Improve observability, performance, resilience, and operational excellence across distributed systems.
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Must Have Qualifications

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• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience.
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• Prior experience operating at Senior Staff, Staff Engineer, Lead Engineer, or equivalent level.
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• Expertise designing and shipping correctness-critical transactional systems involving bookings, payments, reservations, inventory, orders, or commerce platforms.
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• Strong experience designing external APIs, service integrations, and distributed systems.
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• Deep understanding of relational databases, domain modeling, and large-scale system architecture.
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• Experience with cloud-native environments, preferably AWS.
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• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.
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