• Design, build, and own critical backend services — APIs, data pipelines, async workers, and the infrastructure that keeps them running reliably at scale
• Make sound architectural decisions and document trade-offs clearly so the whole team can learn from them
• Drive platform and reliability investments alongside feature work — the foundational improvements that keep pace with growth
• Establish and uphold high standards for code quality, test coverage, and operational excellence
• Diagnose and resolve complex performance, reliability, and scalability issues; conduct thorough post-mortems that prevent recurrence
Distributed Systems & Infrastructure
• Design and maintain distributed systems that are resilient to failure — applying patterns like circuit breakers, retries, idempotency, and rate limiting where they count
• Own the full lifecycle of services from design through deployment, including CI/CD pipelines, containerization (Docker/Kubernetes), and cloud infrastructure
• Implement and iterate on observability practices: structured logging, metrics dashboards, distributed tracing, and alerting
• Contribute to infrastructure-as-code practices (Terraform, Pulumi, or similar) and cloud cost optimization
• Design performant, well-normalized data models across relational (PostgreSQL, MySQL) and non-relational (Redis, MongoDB, DynamoDB) stores
• Build and maintain data pipelines, ETL/ELT workflows, and integrations with third-party services and external APIs
• Apply caching strategies thoughtfully — CDN, in-memory, and application-level — and understand the failure modes of each
• Work with message queues and event streaming platforms (Kafka, SQS, RabbitMQ) to build decoupled, async architectures
• Apply secure coding practices by default: input validation, secrets management, least-privilege access, and protection against common vulnerabilities
• Contribute to compliance efforts (SOC 2, GDPR, or similar) with an understanding of how engineering decisions affect data privacy and auditability
• Be the go-to engineer for hard problems — unblock teammates, provide crisp technical direction, and raise the quality of design reviews
• Mentor junior and mid-level engineers through code review, pairing, and direct, constructive feedback
• Write architecture decision records (ADRs) and technical documentation that outlast the original project
• Partner with Product and Design to scope work realistically, surface constraints early, and deliver with clarity
• Represent engineering in cross-functional conversations and earn influence through execution, not hierarchy