Staff Engineer (back) F M

📋 Description

• • Cheerz is seeking a highly experienced and influential Staff Engineer (Backend) to join our dynamic Tech team in Paris, France. This is a permanent, full-remote position where you will play a pivotal role in shaping the future of our technical landscape. As a Staff Engineer, you will be a recognized technical leader, leveraging your deep expertise and influence to guide the backend engineering team. You will collaborate closely with Engineering Managers and other Staff Engineers, while remaining embedded within an agile squad to stay connected to product delivery and challenges. Your primary focus will be on elevating the technical capabilities of our platforms and the efficiency of our engineering team.
• • Your mission will involve identifying strategic technical initiatives in alignment with the CTO. This includes detecting high-impact opportunities and risks related to scalability, performance, security, costs, developer experience (DX), and technical debt within the backend platform. You will structure these findings into actionable proposals, including clear problem framing, potential options, trade-offs, a defined trajectory, and a realistic execution plan. Crucially, your input will be grounded in practical, on-the-ground insights, fostering a collaborative approach rather than imposing top-down decisions.
• • A key responsibility is to co-construct and drive a transverse technical roadmap for the backend platform, ensuring it is tightly aligned with the overall product roadmap. You will facilitate alignment across different squads, proactively anticipate and mitigate potential blockers, standardize best practices, and ensure their adoption through clear guidelines, Architecture Decision Records (ADRs), and appropriate tooling. While you will champion technical direction, the final prioritization and resource allocation will be a collaborative effort with Engineering Managers and the Product team.
• • You will be the guardian of a reliable, performant, and scalable backend architecture. This involves elevating the overall architectural quality, focusing on API design, modularity, resilience, observability, and effective management of dependencies and legacy systems. You will actively support the ongoing migration from Ruby to Kotlin Spring Boot, providing guidance on patterns, conventions, and best practices. Your experience with Kotlin, the Spring Boot ecosystem, and a pragmatic approach to progressive migration will be invaluable in this transition.
• • Accelerating delivery and enhancing production robustness are critical. You will contribute to improving the entire delivery pipeline, from CI/CD practices and release management to rollback strategies, testing methodologies, monitoring, alerting, and post-mortem analysis. You will also play a role in industrializing our infrastructure, particularly around Kubernetes, to enable more continuous deployments, improve resilience, and enhance scalability. In times of need, you will be ready to intervene in complex incidents and provide temporary support to squads to overcome critical challenges.
• • A significant part of your role will be to foster technical growth within the team. This includes mentoring engineers, leading design reviews, facilitating pair programming sessions, organizing knowledge-sharing sessions, and driving improvements in our quality standards, such as testing, code reviews, and architectural patterns. Your goal is to elevate the collective technical expertise of the entire engineering department.
• • You will act as a crucial bridge between business objectives and technical execution. This involves translating business needs into clear, understandable, and actionable technical decisions. You will also be responsible for making the trade-offs transparent, such as balancing time-to-market with robustness, managing technical debt versus feature delivery, and optimizing infrastructure costs against performance requirements. Your ability to articulate complex technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders and vice-versa will be essential.
• • The current major project involves a significant technical undertaking: migrating our backend stack from Ruby to Kotlin Spring Boot. This initiative aims to modernize our technology foundation, improve performance, and enhance developer productivity. As a Staff Engineer, you will be instrumental in guiding this complex migration, ensuring a smooth transition while minimizing disruption and maximizing the benefits of the new stack.