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