Staff Engineer - Backend
THE ROLE
Staff Engineer (Backend)
We’re looking for a Staff Engineer (Backend) to join our engineering organization. In this role, you will drive the architecture, scalability, and reliability of critical backend systems across multiple teams. You will operate at a strategic level, influencing technical direction, solving highly complex problems, and enabling teams to build robust, high-performing systems.
Success in this role means defining long-term technical vision, improving engineering excellence across the organization, and mentoring senior engineers while driving large-scale impact. This position is critical to scaling our platform and supporting Quince’s mission of delivering exceptional quality at incredible value.
Responsibilities:
Own and evolve multiple critical applications/services, ensuring long-term scalability, reliability, and maintainability
Lead the design and architecture of complex, large-scale distributed systems, frameworks, and platforms across teams
Define and drive the roadmap for engineering and operational excellence at an organizational level
Conduct deep performance analysis and lead system-wide optimizations to ensure high scalability and efficiency
Drive technical planning, system design reviews, and estimation for large, cross-team initiatives
Collaborate with product, data, and infrastructure stakeholders to define ambiguous requirements and translate them into scalable system designs
Provide technical leadership and mentorship to senior and mid-level engineers across teams
Establish and enforce best practices for coding standards, system design, observability, and reliability
Review and guide critical architectural and code decisions across multiple teams
Stay ahead of emerging technologies and introduce new architectural patterns to improve system capabilities
Raise the engineering bar by actively contributing to hiring, team building, and technical culture
Qualifications:
Strong computer science fundamentals including data structures, algorithms, and advanced system design
8+ years of experience working on backend and distributed systems
Deep expertise in Java, Spring/Spring Boot, and SQL/NoSQL databases
Proven experience designing and scaling highly reliable, large-scale distributed systems across multiple services/teams
Strong understanding of concurrency, multithreading, and high-performance system design
Deep knowledge of system architecture, design principles, and trade-off analysis at scale
Experience driving organization-wide technical initiatives and architectural decisions
Strong focus on code quality, latency optimization, observability, and system reliability
Ability to operate effectively in highly ambiguous, fast-paced environments with significant ownership
Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills across technical and business teams
Proven track record of mentoring senior engineers and influencing engineering culture
Preferred:
Experience with cloud-native architectures (AWS preferred)
Strong understanding of microservices, event-driven systems, and distributed system patterns
Experience leading large-scale system migrations or platform transformations
Familiarity with observability tools, monitoring systems, and SRE practices
Experience in high-growth startups or scaling consumer internet platforms
Passion for building platforms that enable teams to move faster with high reliability