Staff Backend Engineer

13 hours ago

San Francisco, California, United States Plenful Full time $180,000 - $300,000 per year

About the role
We're looking for a Staff Backend Engineer to lead the design and development of systems that power our distributed computing, data workflows, and core infrastructure. In this role, you'll take ownership of key backend components, shape database and orchestration architecture, and work closely with DevOps and ML teams. You'll also mentor engineers and help set technical direction across the organization.

What you'll do

  • Core Infrastructure & Workflow Orchestration
    • Maintain and evolve our workflow orchestration system that runs across serverless and containerized environments, processing millions of tasks each month.
    • Design scheduling, queuing, rate limiting, and retry logic for reliable and fair resource allocation.
    • Build mechanisms for state tracking, error handling, timeouts, and cleanup across distributed tasks.
    • Partner with DevOps on observability, structured logging, tracing, and deployment automation.
  • Database Architecture & Data Modeling
    • Design and optimize schemas for flexible data storage and user-defined structures.
    • Improve performance across large datasets (100M+ rows) using indexing, replication, and connection pooling.
    • Ensure ACID compliance, concurrency control, and referential integrity.
    • Implement audit logging, data lineage tracking, and compliant data retention policies.
    • Collaborate with DevOps on replication, backups, and disaster recovery.
  • External Integrations & Data Pipelines
    • Manage integrations with SFTP, email, databases, spreadsheets, and REST APIs, with secure credential and failure recovery handling.
    • Build and maintain file processing pipelines that handle millions of files per month.
    • Work with healthcare data formats (HL7, X12, EDI) and standard file types (PDF, Excel, CSV, JSON).
    • Develop webhook handlers, polling services, and event-driven workflows to ensure data consistency.
    • Collaborate with ML/AI teams on data pipelines for model training and inference.
  • Technical Leadership
    • Lead technical projects and set quality and reliability standards for the backend team.
    • Identify and reduce technical debt; plan and execute major system improvements and migrations.
    • Mentor engineers through code reviews, design sessions, and pair programming.
    • Participate in incident response and postmortems, focusing on long-term reliability.
    • Write and review RFCs to document and guide key architectural decisions.
What we're looking for
  • 8+ years of professional software engineering experience.
  • Strong background in distributed systems, workflow orchestration, and large-scale task processing.
  • Advanced database expertise: SQL, schema design, query tuning, and operations at scale.
  • Solid computer science fundamentals (data structures, algorithms, system design).
  • Experience building and maintaining large-scale data pipelines and external integrations.
  • 3+ years of technical leadership, guiding projects and mentoring engineers.
  • Proven experience leading re-architecture or modernization efforts.
  • Track record of improving reliability, managing incidents, and reducing technical debt.
  • Strong written and verbal communication skills for documentation and cross-team collaboration.
  • Experience working closely with DevOps, observability, and ML/AI teams.
Plenful perks
  • Great benefits include unlimited PTO, health insurance, meal stipend, health & wellness stipend, team offsites, 401K matching, and stock options
  • Opportunities to further develop and refine your partnership acumen by partnering with our seasoned leaders

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