Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Fetch is building systems that power personalized advertising experiences for millions of users. The Staff Backend Engineer will design and scale high-throughput, low-latency distributed systems for real-time advertising decisions, while setting technical standards, leading cross-team initiatives, and mentoring engineers across Ads, Platform, Data, and ML teams.
Responsibilities
- Own architecture across critical Ads services. Design the high-throughput, low-latency services behind ad selection, targeting, pacing, delivery, attribution, and measurement, including the calls on partitioning, caching, consistency, concurrency, and performance across multiple services and domains
- Design for reliability, resilience, and operational excellence. Build systems that degrade gracefully under partial failures, traffic spikes, and downstream degradation, with the metrics, tracing, SLOs, and alerting that give clear visibility into revenue-generating systems
- Evolve event-driven and data-intensive architectures. Design reliable data flows across transactional and non-transactional stores, streaming, messaging, caching, and real-time processing, balancing consistency, durability, latency, scalability, and operational complexity
- Set standards multiple teams adopt. Drive backend, reliability, and performance standards across Ads and adjacent teams, and build reusable services and patterns that cut duplication and accelerate development
- Drive engineering leverage. Lead significant refactoring, migration, and system-health work, and build shared infrastructure and patterns that improve the group's velocity and reliability
- Shape org-level technical direction. Define and deliver multi-quarter initiatives that shape Ads-org direction and influence org-level priorities, and carry technical direction for the group when needed
- Solve high-ambiguity, team-spanning problems. Resolve complex reliability, performance, and scalability problems that span multiple teams, and partner across Ads, Platform, Product, Data, and ML to align investment and surface misalignments early
- Raise the engineering bar across teams. Mentor senior engineers across boundaries, lead technical design reviews, and establish practices for distributed systems, performance, reliability, and operational readiness that other teams adopt
Skills
- Proven track record designing, building, and operating distributed backend systems at significant production scale, with demanding throughput, latency, availability, and reliability requirements
- Deep understanding of distributed systems: partitioning, replication, consistency, caching, concurrency, asynchronous processing, failure isolation, and coordination
- Strong track record diagnosing performance and scaling problems across applications, databases, caches, queues, networks, and infrastructure
- Strong expertise in API design, service boundaries, event-driven architectures, and data-intensive systems (streaming, messaging, distributed stores, caching)
- Demonstrated ownership of architecture for complex distributed systems, including scalability planning, performance optimization, failure modes, and long-term evolution
- Experience building highly reliable production systems with comprehensive observability: metrics, tracing, structured logging, alerting, capacity planning, and incident response
- Experience making architectural decisions involving scalability, reliability, latency, consistency, operational cost, complexity, and developer-productivity tradeoffs
- Ability to independently translate ambiguous product and business requirements into robust backend designs with clear technical and operational tradeoffs
- Org-level influence beyond direct ownership: standards adopted by multiple teams, architecture for company-wide programs, and mentoring senior engineers across boundaries
- Track record of defining and delivering multi-quarter, cross-team initiatives that shaped org direction and resolved high-ambiguity problems
- Experience leading significant refactoring, migration, or system-health work that improved a team or group's velocity and reliability
- Fluency in modern backend and infrastructure ecosystems such as Kubernetes, event streaming, distributed data stores, cloud infrastructure, CI/CD, and observability tooling
- This is a full-time role that can be held from one of our US offices or remotely in the United States
- Direct experience building or scaling advertising, ad-serving, auction, marketplace, recommendation, or other real-time decisioning systems
- Familiarity with advertising concepts such as targeting, pacing, bidding, frequency management, attribution, incrementality, and measurement
- Experience operating at very high request rates with strict tail-latency requirements
- Experience designing multi-region or highly available distributed systems and planning for traffic growth, regional failures, and capacity constraints
- Experience building backend infrastructure that supports real-time ML inference, ranking, recommendation, targeting, or personalization
- Demonstrated success improving system throughput, latency, reliability, or infrastructure efficiency at significant production scale
- Strong judgment about distributed systems complexity, including when sophisticated patterns are necessary and when simpler designs scale further and operate more reliably
- Prior Staff-level experience driving architectural direction across multiple teams, services, or product domains
Benefits
- Equity: We offer full-time employees equity in Fetch, so that everyone can benefit from Fetch’s growth.
- 401k Match: Dollar-for-dollar match up to 4%.
- Benefits for humans and pets: We offer comprehensive medical, dental and vision plans for everyone including your pets.
- Continuing Education: Fetch provides ten thousand per year in education reimbursement.
- Employee Resource Groups: Take part in employee-led groups that are centered around fostering a diverse and inclusive workplace through events, dialogue and advocacy. The ERGs participate in our Inclusion Council with members of executive leadership.
- Paid Time Off: On top of our flexible PTO, Fetch observes 9 paid holidays, as well as our year-end week-long break.
- Robust Leave Policies: 20 weeks of paid parental leave for primary caregivers, 14 weeks for secondary caregivers, and a flexible return to work schedule.
- Calvin Care Cash: Employees who are welcoming new family members will also receive a one time $2,000 incentive to assist employees with covering the cost of childcare, clothing, diapers and much more!
- Flexible Work Environment: Collaborate with your team in one of our stunning offices, or you can work fully remotely from anywhere in the US. We’ll ensure you are equally equipped with the hardware and software you need to get your job done in the comfort of your home. (applicable for most roles)
Company Overview
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