Staff Software Engineer
Collectors Universe, Inc.23 hours ago
Santa Ana, CA, USAStaff+
Responsibilities
- Own the architecture of the API and collectibles data domain across services, data flows, and consumers.
- Define API design, versioning, authentication, rate-limiting, and documentation standards.
- Build and evolve data models, ingestion pipelines, enrichment systems, and access patterns for collectibles data.
- Lead initiatives involving certificate lookup APIs, developer portals, API gateway consolidation, and unified collectibles databases.
- Establish standards for testing, observability, performance, incident response, and operational reliability.
- Lead moderate-to-significant multi-quarter projects, coordinating engineers, stakeholders, and dependencies.
- Partner with Product, Marketplace, Grading, Vault, Data, and platform teams to translate business requirements into technical solutions.
- Mentor senior and mid-level engineers through design reviews, pairing, feedback, and knowledge sharing.
- Establish guardrails and workflows for AI coding tools, agents, code review, testing, security, and intellectual-property hygiene.
Requirements
- 8+ years of engineering experience, including technical leadership of multi-engineer, multi-quarter projects.
- Track record of designing, shipping, and scaling products with measurable business impact at a high-growth company or scaled consumer platform.
- Expert-level backend engineering proficiency in Java and Python, including Spring Boot, complex API surfaces, asynchronous patterns, and distributed data consistency.
- Experience designing and operating REST APIs at scale, with relevant experience in GraphQL or gRPC, versioning, backward compatibility, authentication, and developer experience.
- Deep relational and NoSQL database and data-modeling expertise, including schema design, migrations, query performance, PostgreSQL, and DynamoDB.
- Experience with data ingestion and enrichment pipelines; experience with API gateways such as Kong is a plus.
- Strong distributed-systems experience, including service boundaries, contract design, Kafka-based event-driven architectures, messaging, idempotency, and failure handling.
- Production-depth experience with AWS and Kubernetes, plus infrastructure-as-code fluency using CDK and/or Terraform.
- Enough hands-on experience with modern frontend frameworks such as React to design and review across the full stack.
- Track record of improving testing strategy, observability, documentation, incident response, and engineering standards.
- Experience using Datadog or similar tools for instrumentation, dashboards, alerting, and distributed tracing.
- Daily fluency with AI coding assistants and agentic tools such as Claude Code, Copilot, or Cursor, including judgment about verification, security, and AI-generated code limitations.
- Familiarity with Agile/Scrum methodologies and strong written, verbal, analytical, troubleshooting, and cross-functional communication skills.
- Passion for collecting is a plus.
Benefits
- Candidates within a one-hour commute of the office may be expected to work onsite most of the time; remote-role interview steps may include an onsite interview at the company’s discretion.
- The company supports accommodation requests during the interview process.
- Collectors uses e-Verify to validate authorization to work legally in the United States.
Tech Stack
Amazon DynamoDBApache KafkaAWSDatadogGraphQLgRPCJavaKubernetesPostgreSQLPythonReactSpring BootTerraform
Categories
BackendData Engineering
About Collectors Universe, Inc.
Collectors Universe (Collectors) provides authentication, grading, vaulting, and marketplace services for collectibles such as trading cards, coins, video games, tickets, autographs, comics, and memorabilia. Founded in 1986 and headquartered in Santa Ana, California, the privately held company operates PSA and PCGS, plus PSA Vault and the Card Ladder analytics platform, and integrates with marketplaces like eBay. It earns fees for grading, storage, consignment, and data services, and has certified millions of items.