Senior Staff Software Engineer, Backend Platform

About the Team

The Backend Platform team builds the foundational systems and infrastructure that power Patreon's creator platform. We're responsible for the core backend services, APIs, databases, infrastructure, and developer tooling that enable product teams across the company to ship quickly, reliably, and at scale. This team is growing and investing in foundational platform capabilities that will support Patreon's next phase of scale and product expansion.

About the Role

• Define and drive the technical strategy for Patreon's backend platform and foundational infrastructure
• Lead architecture and implementation of scalable distributed systems, APIs, event-driven systems, and platform services
• Lead modernization efforts across backend architecture, service boundaries, data access patterns, and infrastructure
• Establish technical standards and best practices around reliability, performance, scalability, and maintainability
• Partner with product engineering teams to ensure platform capabilities align with business and product needs
• Shape cross-functional technical decision-making at organizational scale
• Help evolve operational maturity around incident management, resiliency, and production excellence
• Mentor Staff and Senior engineers across the organization through design reviews, technical leadership, and hands-on collaboration

What you'll need

• Extensive experience building large-scale backend systems, with depth in distributed systems and platform architecture (typically 10+ years, or equivalent demonstrated expertise)
• Deep expertise in distributed systems, high-throughput APIs, and low-latency architectures that support millions of DAUs
• Experience with databases, caching systems, and storage technologies (e.g. MySQL, Postgres, Redis, DynamoDB)
• Strong understanding of data modeling, storage systems, caching, queues, and event-driven architectures
• Experience in performance optimization across APIs, databases, caching layers, and distributed services
• Strong operational excellence mindset, including incident response and production debugging
• Experience operating systems in cloud-native environments such as AWS and Kubernetes-based infrastructure
• Proficiency in one or more backend languages such as Python, Go, Java, or Rust
• Ability to communicate complex architectural trade-offs clearly in writing and in cross-functional forums
• Experience mentoring Staff and Senior engineers and contributing to engineering culture through design reviews, documentation, or team standards

We hire talented and passionate people from different backgrounds because workplace diversity and inclusion is critical to our ability to serve creators worldwide. If you’re excited about a role but your past experience doesn’t match with every bullet point outlined above, we strongly encourage you to apply anyway. If you’re a creator at heart, are energized by our mission, and share our company values, we’d love to hear from you.