Staff Backend Software Engineer

Feathr's SaaS platform is a critical component of the value we deliver to our clients. As a Staff Engineer, you shape the technical direction of the systems that meet the advertising, marketing, and analytics needs of our diverse customer base.

In practice, you own one or more product areas. You identify the technical problems and opportunities in your areas, shape the solutions the team commits to, and build the most challenging parts yourself. The team decides what to build, and you supply the technical judgment behind those decisions. You work across the full stack, from Python services on the backend to React and TypeScript interfaces on the frontend. Engineers come to you when a problem has no established answer. This is an individual contributor role: you deliver primarily through the work you scope and build yourself.

KPIs
We use these measures as signals of team health, not as individual scorecards. They show leadership which teams make good progress and which teams need help. We do not use these numbers to decide promotions. We assess your performance against the ownership and deliverables in this document.

Cycle time: work ships within the team's time target.
Throughput: the systems you own show steady incremental work, week over week.
Rework: solutions you scope hold up. Work shipped rarely comes back with defects.
Quality: your code and your reviews stop critical bugs before production. Your review turnaround is fast.
Growth: engineers you mentor are able to tackle larger and more complex projects over time.
Visibility: your process and decisions are written down where the team can find them.
Accountability / Ownership
You own:

The technical solutions for the bets in your product areas, including the technical scope and the tradeoffs behind it.
The hardest technical work on the board, which you build yourself.
The quality standards for your areas, including code review and testing strategy.
Work you ship, until the bet closes at outcome confirmed. The team monitors the outcome metric for about 30 days after launch, and you handle monitoring, debugging, and fixes during that period.
You advise on:

Bets: feasibility, cost, and risk during discovery, and how the team breaks them into work items that match the technical scope.
Architecture: long-term technology choices, major changes to shared systems, and standards shared across pods.
Engineering hiring.
Deliverables
Technical scopes for the bets in your areas, with the options, the chosen approach, and the tradeoffs. These documents extend the Scope artifact from discovery.
Prototypes that retire feasibility risk before the team writes production code.
Working software, including the most challenging pieces in your product areas.
Standards, templates, and examples that other engineers reuse.
Upgrade and migration plans for the systems you own.
Experience
8+ years building software that runs in production.
Expert skill in backend development.
Experience with our stack or a similar stack: Python and Flask-style APIs, MongoDB, Elasticsearch, and Redis on the backend.
You have scoped and shipped distributed systems that use queues, caches, and search.
You have run software on AWS and Kubernetes at production scale.
You have scoped solutions that other engineers built successfully.
You have mentored engineers and helped them advance to larger roles.
You write clearly: your technical scopes and decisions are easy to follow.
You have built and improved CI/CD pipelines, and you consider security in the solutions you scope.