Sr. Software Engineer - Backend/Full-stack

Location: Palo Alto, CA

Department: Engineering

Location Type: HYBRID

Employment Type: FULL_TIME

• Own the systems that matter most. Take full lifecycle ownership of core platform services — design, build, deploy, operate — especially the ones where the obvious architecture doesn't hold up, and you have to design a better one.
• Make the rest of engineering better at shipping. You'll push back when a design won't scale, an approach trades short-term speed for long-term pain, or a "good enough" isn't. You earn the standing to do this by being right, consistently, and by being someone teams want in the room.
• Move fast without creating friction. You'll make architectural calls, iterate in real time, and adjust course mid-build — all while keeping other teams, and the systems they depend on, aligned and stable. No surprises, no silent breakage.
• Build the platform as you go. Better tooling, smarter use of AI-assisted development, sharper observability and incident response — you'll leave the platform meaningfully stronger than you found it, and you'll do it in a way that earns trust rather than working around people.

• You want a well-defined system to maintain, rather than one to build and rebuild as the business scales.
• When something breaks or doesn't scale, you wait for direction instead of diagnosing and fixing it yourself.
• You've mostly worked in codebases where the hard architectural decisions were already made — this job is proactive, not maintenance.
• You measure success by "it shipped" rather than "it shipped, it holds up, and the team trusts how we got there."
• You've built a reputation for moving fast at the cost of the people around you — trust and speed both matter here, not one traded for the other.

• 5+ years as a software engineer, with real ownership of production systems at a startup — you've designed and shipped systems end to end, not just contributed to systems someone else architected.
• Fluency in Python or Go, with strong data modeling and system design instincts.
• Experience building SaaS or multi-tenant systems, and the product judgment that comes with it.
• A track record of solving hard, ambiguous engineering problems — untangling messy domains, making design decisions with incomplete information, and owning the outcome — not just building well-scoped features.
• Fluent in AI-assisted development as a default way of working, and able to bring others along on it.
• Evidence that other engineers and leaders trusted your judgment and wanted you on their hardest problems — examples that speak to this are a plus.