SlipstreamJobs tracks this role from the company's public career site. Apply directly on the employer's site.
Stream powers real-time Chat, Video, Activity Feeds, and AI Moderation for over 1 billion end users across 4,000+ applications including Strava, Bumble, eBay, and Patreon. The platform processes billions of API requests monthly and supports applications with millions of concurrent users while maintaining highly reliable, low-latency services.
You will join the Chat or Activity Feeds team as a Staff Software Engineer, owning backend systems that thousands of developers build their products on. This is a hands-on individual contributor role where you'll write code, touch databases, and own meaningful areas of the system. You'll ship to production in your first weeks and take ownership of significant backend infrastructure. The role involves approximately 80% hands-on technical work, with the remainder spent on technical leadership and mentoring.
Stream is a Series B company with 140+ employees across offices in Boulder, Amsterdam, Skopje, and Toronto. The company is backed by Felicis Ventures, GGV Capital, 01 Advisors, Techstars, and Arthur Ventures, with notable angels including Dick Costolo (ex-CEO Twitter), Olivier Pomel (CEO Datadog), Tom Preston-Werner (GitHub co-founder), and Nicolas Dessaigne (Algolia co-founder).
The tech stack includes Go, gRPC, RocksDB, and Python; PostgreSQL and RabbitMQ; GCP and Kubernetes; observability tools like Grafana, Prometheus, ELK, Jaeger, Tempo, and Datadog; plus Redis, Valkey, and Memcached. You'll work on systems handling massive scale, where cost per message and query latency directly impact margins and customer applications.
Amsterdam office benefits include 28 days paid time off plus Dutch public holidays, pension plan with company contribution, NS Business Card or company bike, EUR 500 annual professional development budget, catered lunches, MacBook Pro, up to EUR 60/month gym membership, and relocation support with visa sponsorship. Remote EU candidates and those in Toronto or Skopje receive localized benefits.
REQUIREMENTS:
- Extensive backend engineering experience, including technical leadership on production systems
- Proficiency in Go, Python, or another backend language with willingness to switch to Go
- Experience building features for large user bases and scaling them as usage grows
- Strong relational database experience (PostgreSQL preferred, but any relational DB counts)
- Hands-on experience with Redis or similar in-memory data stores
- Experience building public APIs or SDKs used by other developers
- Comfort with infrastructure and database work as part of normal responsibilities, including Kubernetes
- Good written and spoken English (working language)
BONUS EXPERIENCE:
- PostgreSQL at scale in production (sharding, partitioning, large migrations)
- Improving or redesigning legacy system components serving live traffic
- Go and gRPC in production at high request rates
- Messaging, feeds, real-time systems, or message queues (RabbitMQ, Kafka)
- Distributed storage internals (Raft, RocksDB)
- Infrastructure cost optimization at margin-sensitive companies
- GCP or AWS workload experience
