Staff Engineer - Backend

THE ROLE

Staff Engineer (Backend)

We're looking for a Staff Engineer (Backend) to join our engineering organization. In this role, you will drive the architecture, scalability, and reliability of critical backend systems across multiple teams. You will operate at a strategic level, influencing technical direction, solving highly complex problems, and enabling teams to build robust, high-performing systems.

Success in this role means defining long-term technical vision, improving engineering excellence across the organization, and mentoring senior engineers while driving large-scale impact. This position is critical to scaling our platform and supporting Quince's mission of delivering exceptional quality at incredible value.

Responsibilities:

• Own and evolve multiple critical applications/services, ensuring long-term scalability, reliability, and maintainability
• Lead the design and architecture of complex, large-scale distributed systems, frameworks, and platforms across teams
• Define and drive the roadmap for engineering and operational excellence at an organizational level
• Conduct deep performance analysis and lead system-wide optimizations to ensure high scalability and efficiency
• Drive technical planning, system design reviews, and estimation for large, cross-team initiatives
• Collaborate with product, data, and infrastructure stakeholders to define ambiguous requirements and translate them into scalable system designs
• Provide technical leadership and mentorship to senior and mid-level engineers across teams
• Establish and enforce best practices for coding standards, system design, observability, and reliability
• Review and guide critical architectural and code decisions across multiple teams
• Stay ahead of emerging technologies and introduce new architectural patterns to improve system capabilities
• Raise the engineering bar by actively contributing to hiring, team building, and technical culture

Qualifications:

• Strong computer science fundamentals including data structures, algorithms, and advanced system design
• 8+ years of experience working on backend and distributed systems
• Deep expertise in Java, Spring/Spring Boot, and SQL/NoSQL databases
• Proven experience designing and scaling highly reliable, large-scale distributed systems across multiple services/teams
• Strong understanding of concurrency, multithreading, and high-performance system design
• Deep knowledge of system architecture, design principles, and trade-off analysis at scale
• Experience driving organization-wide technical initiatives and architectural decisions
• Strong focus on code quality, latency optimization, observability, and system reliability
• Ability to operate effectively in highly ambiguous, fast-paced environments with significant ownership
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills across technical and business teams
• Proven track record of mentoring senior engineers and influencing engineering culture

Preferred:

• Experience with cloud-native architectures (AWS preferred)
• Strong understanding of microservices, event-driven systems, and distributed system patterns
• Experience leading large-scale system migrations or platform transformations
• Familiarity with observability tools, monitoring systems, and SRE practices
• Experience in high-growth startups or scaling consumer internet platforms
• Passion for building platforms that enable teams to move faster with high reliability