Senior Staff Software Engineer, Backend Platform

📋 Description

• • Lead the technical strategy and architecture for Patreon’s backend platform, ensuring foundational systems scale to support millions of daily active users and billions in creator earnings.
• • Design, build, and modernize distributed systems, high-throughput APIs, and event-driven architectures that power core creator experiences including paid memberships, community chats, live video, and one-time purchases.
• • Establish and enforce technical standards for reliability, performance, scalability, and maintainability across all backend services and infrastructure.
• • Partner with product engineering teams to align platform capabilities with business goals, ensuring seamless integration of new features while maintaining system stability and performance.
• • Drive large-scale modernization initiatives across service boundaries, data access patterns, caching strategies, and infrastructure patterns to improve developer velocity and system resilience.
• • Shape cross-functional technical decisions at the organizational level, influencing architecture roadmaps and engineering priorities across multiple teams.
• • Enhance operational maturity by improving incident management processes, production debugging practices, and system resiliency through proactive monitoring and post-mortem culture.
• • Mentor Staff and Senior engineers through hands-on collaboration, design reviews, documentation, and technical leadership to elevate the overall engineering capability across the organization.
• • Architect and implement cloud-native systems on AWS and Kubernetes-based infrastructure, optimizing for cost, performance, and reliability in a hybrid production environment.
• • Develop and maintain core platform services including databases, caching layers (e.g., Redis), message queues, and storage systems (e.g., MySQL, Postgres, DynamoDB) that underpin Patreon’s creator platform.
• • Optimize end-to-end performance across APIs, databases, caching tiers, and distributed services to reduce latency and increase throughput for high-traffic creator-facing features.
• • Communicate complex architectural trade-offs clearly in writing and in cross-functional forums to ensure alignment between engineering, product, and operations stakeholders.
• • Contribute to engineering culture by defining team standards, improving documentation, leading technical onboarding, and promoting best practices in code quality and system observability.
• • Support the evolution of Patreon’s platform to accommodate new creator monetization models, including free memberships, direct fan purchases, and community engagement tools.
• • Ensure systems are resilient, observable, and self-healing, with clear incident response protocols and automated recovery mechanisms in place.
• • Collaborate with infrastructure and DevOps teams to improve deployment pipelines, environment management, and CI/CD workflows for backend services.
• • Uphold Patreon’s mission of funding the creative class by building reliable, scalable, and developer-friendly platform infrastructure that empowers creators and their audiences.