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Salary: USD 200,000 - 240,000 / annual
Customer.io is seeking a Staff Software Engineer, Backend to shape the technical direction of distributed messaging systems that move billions of messages daily. This is a high-impact individual contributor role focused on setting architectural direction, solving cross-functional problems, and multiplying the effectiveness of the engineering organization.
You will own ambiguous, high-stakes technical problems that span squad boundaries and drive them to resolution when the right answer isn't obvious. You'll make architectural decisions for mission-critical services where scale, cost, and reliability are in tension. Your responsibilities include building consensus on contested technical questions, communicating tradeoffs to senior leadership, and raising the department's technical bar through mentorship, standards-setting, and documentation that enables other teams to execute without your direct involvement.
You'll drive engineering process and tooling improvements across multiple squads, participate in hiring and career calibration, and use AI agents to scope and execute multi-file code changes. The role emphasizes ownership at company scale—claiming problems nobody has yet owned and either solving them or getting leadership aligned.
Customer.io's platform powers automated communication for over 9,000 companies, from startups to global brands. The tech stack includes Go, React, Ember, and AI. The company values engineers with product taste who connect architectural decisions to customer experience, healthy skepticism about established practices, and a bias for action balanced with good judgment about which decisions warrant deliberation.
REQUIREMENTS:
- 10+ years building scalable, distributed systems in Go or similar statically typed languages, with several years as the person others turned to for architectural guidance
- Depth across multiple systems or domains—recognized expertise in more than one area
- Track record of designing for production reality: quantifying tradeoffs in throughput, cost, and reliability rather than defending a single path
- Experience designing observability and recovery as first-class concerns (metrics, alerting, rollback, backpressure, checkpointing)
- Comfort in cloud-native environments (AWS, GCP), relational databases (MySQL), with real understanding of performance tradeoffs
- Evidence of making other engineers better through mentorship, technical writing, design review, or standards that outlasted your involvement
- Bias for action over perfection, with judgment to know which decisions warrant slowing down
