Staff Software Engineer

About the company

Our client is a fast-growing financial technology company.

The role

Raydar is recruiting for this role on behalf of our client. Own the design and architecture of core backend systems for a real-time product, taking features from first design through to live production. Contribute across the entire product in a compact, office-based engineering team, with emphasis on speed and resilience.

What you'll do

- Design and own core backend systems for low-latency, real-time services.

- Drive performance and reliability improvements using event-driven designs and parallel processing.

- Collaborate with a small engineering group and company founders across infrastructure, backend and reliability work.

- Deploy, operate and scale fault-tolerant distributed systems on container orchestration.

- Take features from initial design through to live production, often within days.

- Help build and refine machine learning systems that improve from ongoing feedback.

Requirements

What we're looking for

- At least 3 years of professional software engineering experience.

- Computer Science degree.

- Prior work building fast, time-sensitive backend or full-stack software.

- Strong database design and performance optimization skills.

- Solid grasp of how multi-node software stays available and recovers from failures.

- Hands-on history of carrying backend services from build through to running in production, with full accountability.

- Comfort owning design and architecture across an entire product.

- Familiarity with AI and large language models.

- Backend or full-stack experience rather than frontend work alone.

Bonus points

- Four or more years of experience.

- Background in creating or running machine learning models in live environments.

- Startup, founder or mid-size company experience, including after a large technology company.

- Python experience.

- A degree from a strong university computer science program.

Benefits

Compensation and benefits

- Base salary: USD 250K to 320K

- Equity

Location and work model

- San Francisco, California, United States

- On-site, 5 days a week

- Full-time