United States onlyWe're looking for a Principal Backend Engineer who thrives at the intersection of AI, security, and developer experience. You'll lead the technical direction of the Gateway and related services, collaborating closely with Product, Design, and Security to deliver elegant frameworks and APIs that developers love to use.
Requirements
- 12+ years of backend engineering experience, including extensive work on production-grade, distributed systems at scale.
- Technical leadership across multiple teams or domains, with a proven ability to drive architectural vision, set technical direction, and influence long-term product strategy.
- Exceptional product and platform mindset—you think beyond implementation details to how technology shapes developer and business outcomes.
- Expertise in designing and evolving large-scale, cloud-native systems, with deep knowledge of distributed computing, service-oriented architecture, and performance optimization.
- Demonstrated experience building secure, resilient, and high-throughput backend services, with a strong grasp of reliability engineering principles (SLOs, observability, incident response).
- Fluency in Go (preferred) or another modern systems language (Rust, Java, C++, etc.), with the ability to lead technical design reviews and mentor others in language-specific best practices.
- Strong grasp of software engineering fundamentals—CI/CD, testing strategy, source control, and deployment automation—applied in complex, multi-service environments.
- Proven track record of technical mentorship and cross-functional collaboration, enabling teams to deliver high-impact, high-quality software efficiently.
- Deep experience with major cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP) and infrastructure-as-code tooling.
- Ownership mentality with a bias for action and iterative delivery, balancing short-term impact with long-term architectural health.
- Excellent communication skills, with the ability to clearly articulate complex technical concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences.
- Comfortable operating autonomously in distributed, remote-first teams, and leading through influence rather than authority.
Benefits
- Freedom & flexibility; fit your work around your life
- Designated quarterly Whaleness Days
- Home office setup; we want you comfortable while you work
- 16 weeks of paid Parental leave
- Technology stipend equivalent to $100 net/month
- PTO plan that encourages you to take time to do the things you enjoy
- Quarterly, company-wide hackathons
- Training stipend for conferences, courses and classes
- Equity; we are a growing start-up and want all employees to have a share in the success of the company
- Docker Swag
- Medical benefits, retirement and holidays vary by country
CA and US only
FR, DE + 4 more
