Principal Backend Engineer

Strong backend engineering fundamentals to build and ship distributed systems. Track record of mentoring and teaching people. Ability to embrace ambiguity and formulate go forward plans. Product minded and can lead a group from ideation to MVP to a polished production implementation. Understand tradeoffs and can make decisions under ambiguity. Care about latency, data correctness, observability, cost, and operational excellence. Give and receive direct feedback. 10+ years of experience as a software engineer building large-scale distributed backend systems. Proficiency in Go. Experience designing systems leveraging AWS, Kafka, GraphQL, Kubernetes, and Datadog. Experience operating at Medium’s product/user scale. Experience modernizing legacy code bases. Experience building backend infrastructure to support myriad technical stacks, including AI and ML features. Experience utilizing modern AI tooling to accelerate development efforts.

Own the architecture for large-scale, complex product projects. Own the implementation of critical features and systems, ensuring their ongoing health, scalability, and efficiency, while improving and modernizing the surrounding ecosystems. Work with engineering, design, and product leadership to evolve existing features and innovate in new directions. Lead efforts to improve engineering standards, tools, frameworks, and processes. Mentor and develop other engineers on the team. Attend Medium’s twice-yearly, in-person offsites (hosted in locations around the U.S.).