Staff Engineer

Location: Porto, Porto District, Portugal

Department: Engineering

Workplace: hybrid

Description

Pixelmatters is a digital product studio. We’re a team of strategists, designers and engineers creating top-quality digital products.

Our mission is to empower businesses to achieve their full potential by creating top-quality digital products while fostering great relationships along the way. We envision a world where great user experience is the norm, not the exception, inspiring businesses and people to be at their best.

We're looking for you, a meticulous, curious and adaptable Staff Engineer, who has the ability to architect and guide the development of scalable, high-performance digital products across the entire stack. You combine deep technical expertise with strong ownership and leadership, acting as a technical reference across teams and driving engineering excellence within projects.

Your role will focus on designing and evolving robust full-stack architectures using NestJS and React, deployed on top of AWS. You will play a key role in shaping technical decisions, guiding architectural discussions, and ensuring solutions are secure, scalable, and maintainable. You will also support teams in tackling complex technical challenges and help establish best practices across the engineering organization. You will be involved in all stages of product development, from front-end architecture and API design to database modeling, infrastructure, and deployment workflows. While remaining hands-on when needed, your role will also focus on providing technical guidance, mentoring engineers, and ensuring long-term architectural consistency across projects.

Some of your day-to-day tasks will include contributing to system architecture decisions, reviewing complex technical implementations, supporting teams in designing scalable front-end and back-end solutions, improving CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure practices, mentoring engineers, and proactively identifying opportunities to improve performance, reliability, and security across the platform.

Requirements

• 10+ years of experience in software engineering, with strong full-stack experience in JavaScript ecosystems.
• Proven experience working with frameworks like NestJS and React (or similar), with the ability to make and guide architectural decisions across front-end and back-end systems.
• Strong foundation in software architecture, system design, and engineering best practices, with experience building and evolving scalable systems.
• Experience designing APIs, data models, and efficient data flows across the stack, including performance optimization and caching strategies.
• Solid experience working with relational and/or NoSQL databases, including performance tuning and data integrity.
• Experience working in cloud environments (preferably AWS), including designing and maintaining scalable, reliable architectures.
• Ability to work across teams, collaborating closely with engineering, product, and design to deliver high-quality solutions.
• Strong ownership mindset, with the ability to identify problems, drive solutions, and unblock teams.
• Experience mentoring engineers, providing high-quality code reviews, and raising engineering standards.
• Excellent understanding of English and Portuguese (written and spoken).
  

It would be awesome if you also have…

• Experience with Docker and containerized environments.
• Experience with observability (logging, monitoring, tracing) and performance profiling.
• Experience leading multiple initiatives that span across multiple engineers or projects.
• Interest in improving engineering practices and contributing to company-wide technical direction.

Benefits

• Quality-driven, inspiring, and collaborative work environment.
• Competitive salary and benefits, including health insurance.
• We have a brand new office located at Porto’s downtown while continuing to back our “Remote as default, Office as an option” policy.

Compensation

• The salary range from this role is between €53,426 to €61,126 annual gross which includes meal, vacation, and Xmas allowance.