Staff Backend Engineer

This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Staff Backend Engineer based in Canada. This role offers the opportunity to design and build backend infrastructure supporting some of the world's most demanding observability and software delivery environments. You will work on distributed systems where scalability, reliability, security, and performance are critical. As a Staff Engineer, you will influence architecture, guide technical direction, and help solve complex challenges for large-scale enterprise operators. You will work primarily with Go while contributing across APIs, databases, Kubernetes, CI/CD, and observability technologies. The position combines hands-on engineering with technical leadership, customer engagement, and mentoring. You will join a fully remote, globally distributed engineering environment built around autonomy, transparency, open-source principles, and continuous learning. Accountabilities: As a Staff Backend Engineer, you will lead the design and development of enterprise-grade backend systems while helping shape engineering practices and technical strategy. You will work closely with customers, product teams, and fellow engineers to turn complex infrastructure challenges into reliable, scalable solutions. - Design and lead the development of distributed backend services and enterprise features using Go. - Architect systems with a focus on correctness, scalability, observability, performance, security, and reliability. - Drive projects from initial ideation through development, deployment, and production operations. - Design APIs and service contracts used by enterprise operators and cloud service providers. - Contribute to the scalability, reliability, security, and multi-tenancy of large-scale observability infrastructure.

- Work directly with large enterprise customers and cloud service providers to understand their requirements and translate them into robust technical solutions. - Advocate for customer needs throughout the product and engineering lifecycle. - Collaborate with Product, UX, frontend engineers, and other technical teams to deliver complete end-to-end solutions. - Drive continuous improvements to engineering culture, development practices, and operational processes. - Hire, mentor, and develop engineers while contributing to the growth of the broader engineering organization. - Develop thought leadership around engineering and operational practices and help raise technical standards across teams. - Participate in weekday and weekend on-call rotations while actively contributing to efforts that reduce operational load. - Use modern AI-assisted development tools for prototyping, test generation, refactoring, documentation, and incident follow-ups while maintaining strong code review and quality standards. Requirements The ideal candidate is an experienced backend engineer with deep distributed-systems expertise and a track record of operating production software at significant scale. You should combine strong technical judgment with excellent communication, customer focus, and the ability to lead through influence. - Extensive professional experience building and operating production backend services throughout the full software lifecycle. - Strong professional experience with Go and backend engineering. - Deep understanding of distributed systems concepts, including replication, consistency models, partitioning, fault tolerance, and large-scale operational trade-offs. - Experience designing and operating high-traffic, highly available, or multi-tenant systems, ideally for infrastructure, observability, software delivery, or similar platforms. - Experience designing and consuming gRPC/protobuf APIs and creating clean service contracts across system boundaries.