Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Communications Platform)
SquarespaceBase Salary
$186k - $299k/yr
Responsibilities
- Drive the architecture, design, and implementation of email delivery, in-product notification, and push notification platforms.
- Own technical strategy for platform modernization, reliability hardening, and backend engineering standards.
- Provide hands-on technical leadership and mentorship to backend and frontend engineers.
- Write Java code and lead design reviews, code reviews, and architectural decisions.
- Identify and address systemic risks in performance, reliability, security, and operability.
- Partner on cross-team and company-wide architecture initiatives.
- Balance short-term delivery with long-term platform health and communicate tradeoffs to stakeholders and leadership.
Requirements
- 10+ years of backend engineering experience building and operating large-scale, customer-facing systems.
- Deep expertise in Java and backend service development, including APIs, asynchronous processing, messaging systems such as Kafka, and data stores such as MongoDB and CockroachDB.
- Strong production experience with distributed systems, including reliability, scaling, failure modes, and observability.
- Proven technical leadership at the Staff or Senior-plus level across multiple teams or services.
- Experience modernizing legacy platforms, simplifying complexity, and improving reliability without unnecessary rewrites.
- Experience in platform engineering contexts serving internal or external product teams through high-quality APIs and abstractions.
- Understanding of multi-channel communication infrastructure is a meaningful plus.
- Ability to communicate complex technical concepts clearly to technical and non-technical partners.
- Commitment to mentorship, collaboration, and inclusive technical leadership.
Benefits
- Choice of medical plans, including an option for 100% covered premiums.
- Fertility and adoption benefits, supplemental insurance, a Headspace subscription, and a Global Employee Assistance Program.
- Retirement benefits with employer match, flexible paid time off, paid parental and family care leave, and pretax commuter benefits.
- Education reimbursement, employee donation matching, and access to seven Global Employee Resource Groups.
- Dog-friendly workplace, free lunch and snacks, a private rooftop, and hack week twice per year.
- Hybrid work arrangement based in the New York City office three days per week.
Tech Stack
About Squarespace
Squarespace is a design-driven platform that gives entrepreneurs the tools to establish a powerful online presence on their own terms. For over 20 years, we've helped millions across more than 200 countries and territories build, grow, and run their businesses online. Our integrated, AI-powered suite of products includes websites, domains, ecommerce, payments, marketing tools, and appointment scheduling through Acuity. Every product is built with the same belief — that how you show up online matters. For more information, visit www.squarespace.com. If you are a customer that needs help, we invite you to browse the extensive collection of guides in our Help Center: https://support.squarespace.com/hc/en-us. For more personalized support, you can email our award-winning Customer Support team anytime or live chat here: https://support.squarespace.com/hc/en-us/p/contact. Please remember Squarespace will never solicit your personal banking information or ask you to transfer money in connection with a job offer or interview. We also won’t reach out to you directly via phone or SMS without your permission or knowledge. For information about how to apply for our open roles, visit our Careers page at https://www.squarespace.com/about/careers. If you’ve received a suspicious communication about a potential career opportunity with us, please report it here https://www.squarespace.com/hr-inquiries. To report a possible scam on LinkedIn, please head to: https://www.linkedin.com/help/linkedin/ask/TS-RPS