Staff Software Engineer, Platform
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Overview
Job Description
About the role
You'll own critical platform infrastructure supporting 70M+ users and scaling to hundreds of millions. This means architecting the core data model and storage systems powering Gamma's business, building real-time collaborative editing systems, high-volume event pipelines, and public APIs while driving technical strategy for databases, caching layers, distributed systems, and observability. You'll lead major infrastructure initiatives including database migrations, architecture refactors, and performance optimization at massive scale.
As a Staff Engineer on the Platform team, you'll define engineering standards and best practices across backend teams while mentoring engineers on system design, scalability patterns, and production excellence. You'll make critical build vs buy decisions, balance technical debt paydown with feature velocity, and collaborate with leadership to shape our multi-year platform roadmap. You'll bring high technical judgment, knowing when to over-engineer vs under-engineer and when perfection matters vs good enough.
Our team has a strong in-office culture and works in person 4–5 days per week in San Francisco. We love working together to stay creative and connected, with flexibility to work from home when focus matters most.
What you'll do
Architect and scale core platform systems including databases, caching layers, event pipelines, and public APIs for 70M+ users
Lead major infrastructure initiatives: database migrations, architecture refactors, and performance optimization at scale
Define engineering standards and best practices across backend teams
Mentor engineers on system design, scalability patterns, and production excellence
Make build-vs-buy decisions and balance technical debt paydown with feature velocity
Collaborate with leadership to shape Gamma's multi-year platform roadmap
What you'll bring
7+ years of backend engineering experience with deep expertise in distributed systems and data infrastructure, and a proven track record of architecting systems that scaled through multiple orders of magnitude
Expert-level proficiency in scalable APIs, databases (PostgreSQL, Redis), and event-driven architectures
Experience with real-time systems such as collaborative editing, WebSockets, CRDTs, or similar conflict resolution approaches
Strong operational chops: monitoring, alerting, incident response, and performance debugging at scale, with proficiency in backend technologies like Node.js, Python, or similar
Product-minded technical judgment, with the ability to make decisions that unlock business value and user experience
Experience building platform infrastructure at high-growth startups, or working with AI infrastructure or public API design (Nice to have)
Compensation range:
The base salary for this full-time position, which spans multiple internal levels depending on qualifications, ranges between $230K - $310K plus benefits & equity.
Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors, including but not limited to experience and expertise in the requirements listed above.
If you're interested in this role but you don't meet every requirement, we encourage you to apply anyway! We're always excited about meeting great people.
Automate your job search with Sonara.
Submit 10x as many applications with less effort than one manual application.
