Staff Engineer (Backend) - Platform

Role Overview

As a Staff Engineer (Backend) in the Platform team, you set the technical direction for the shared foundations that every Ajaib product runs on: identity, core services, API standards, observability and developer tooling. You treat the platform as a product whose customers are other engineers, solve the hardest cross-team problems, and make engineers across the company stronger. You stay hands-on where it matters most.

• Define the technical direction and architecture for platform systems that span many teams.
• Lead the design of scalable, secure, multi-tenant services and review critical designs from other teams.
• Set API and contract standards across the company: versioning, backward compatibility, deprecation and documentation.
• Lead the architecture of identity and access: authentication, authorization, token handling and service-to-service security.
• Design for reliability: service level objectives, rate limiting, isolation between consumers, graceful degradation and disaster recovery.
• Build the golden paths that make good engineering the easy path: service templates, shared libraries, CI/CD standards and observability defaults.
• Plan and lead large migrations across many teams, with clear timelines, tooling and support.
• Identify technical risks early, weigh trade-offs and drive decisions that fit business and regulatory needs.
• Lead investigations and root cause analysis for complex production incidents, and drive lasting improvements.
• Partner with Engineering Managers, Product, Security, Infrastructure and Architecture on cross-team initiatives.
• Mentor Senior Engineers and help grow technical leadership across the company.
• Stay hands-on with implementation for critical components and complex problems.

Qualifications

• Education: Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science or equivalent practical experience.
• Experience: 8+ years of professional software engineering, with a proven record of designing and running platform or shared services used by many teams, and leading technical work across teams.
• Languages: Highly proficient in Java, Go or another modern backend language.
• System Design & Architecture: Strong expertise in microservices, event-driven architectures, multi-tenant design, reliability engineering, observability and performance optimization.
• Security: Deep knowledge of authentication and authorization (Keycloak / Ory Stack, OAuth2, OpenID Connect, JWT, mTLS) and secure system design.
• Data & Messaging: Deep practical experience with Kafka, Redis, and relational and NoSQL databases, including query tuning and data consistency.
• Infrastructure: Experience designing and operating applications on cloud platforms (GCP, AWS) and Kubernetes.
• Mindset: Product mindset toward internal users. Strong communication, with the ability to influence technical decisions without direct authority. Experience in fintech or another regulated environment is a plus.