Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Customer.io is a communication platform that helps companies send automated, behavior-based messages across email, push notifications, in-app messaging, and SMS. The Staff Software Engineer will set technical direction for distributed messaging systems, resolve high-stakes cross-team architectural problems, improve engineering practices, and raise the capabilities of other engineers.
Responsibilities
- Shape the technical direction of our distributed messaging systems in Go — making the high-level architectural calls on mission-critical services where scale, cost, and reliability are all in tension
- Take on ambiguous, high-stakes problems that cross squad and function boundaries, and drive them to a decision when the right answer isn't obvious to anyone yet
- Build consensus on contested technical questions across teams, and communicate the tradeoffs clearly enough that senior leadership can act on them
- Raise the department's bar — set quality and design standards, mentor senior engineers, and turn what you know into frameworks and documentation other teams can use without you in the room
- Drive engineering process and tooling improvements that span multiple squads, not just your own
- Interview and calibrate against our career ladder, giving honest, evidence-based assessments of candidates
- Use AI agents to make multi-file changes by scoping the work, writing the prompt, and verifying the output
Skills
- 10+ years building scalable, distributed systems in Go (or similar statically typed languages), including several as the person others turned to on architecture
- Depth across multiple systems or domains, not just one — you've been the recognized expert in more than one place
- A track record of designing for production reality: you quantify tradeoffs in throughput, cost, and reliability rather than picking a reasonable path and defending it
- Experience designing observability and recovery as first-class concerns — metrics, alerting, rollback, backpressure, checkpointing — not logging added afterward
- Comfort working in cloud-native environments (AWS, GCP), with relational databases (we use MySQL) and a real understanding of performance tradeoffs
- Evidence of making other engineers better: mentorship, technical writing, design review, standards that outlasted your involvement
- A bias for action over perfection, and the judgment to know which decisions are worth slowing down for
Benefits
- 10% annual bonus target
- 100% coverage of medical, dental, vision, mental health, and supplemental insurance premiums for you and your family
- 16 weeks paid parental leave
- Unlimited PTO
- Stipends for remote work and wellness
- A professional development budget
Company Overview
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