Our systems ingest thousands of documents per day, orchestrate AI-powered workflows, and surface actionable insights in a heavily regulated environment. As a Staff Backend Engineer, you’ll lead the highest-leverage backend projects at Stream—architecting core services, setting technical direction, and mentoring the team through strong standards and reviews. You’ll turn ambiguous problems into reliable production systems.
That includes defining success metrics, validating solutions with data, and building the infrastructure that makes AI-assisted workflows safe, fast, and maintainable over time. This role is based in our San Francisco office (Mission District) and is in person four days per week. ## **What You’ll Do** * **Own high-impact initiatives end to end**: discovery → requirements → MVP → evaluation → production → monitoring. * **Productionize agentic systems** by orchestrating LLM/embedding pipelines with guardrails, caching, retries, evals, and robust failure handling. * **Build and scale core backend services** that ingest documents, run workflows, and deliver customer value with low latency and cost. * **Design systems and data models** that hold up at scale (DynamoDB/Redshift/S3), with audit trails and easy querying. * **Raise the bar on platform quality**: reliability, observability, SLOs, incident response, and strong engineering standards through design docs and reviews. ## **What You’ll Bring** * **8+ years building backend systems** in production, ideally in SaaS or data-heavy environments. * **Strong systems thinking**: APIs, async processing, data-intensive workloads, and resilience under failure. * **Strong Python + AWS experience** (or comparable), including serverless/container workloads and data systems (DynamoDB/Redshift/S3). * **Experience shipping AI/ML-powered features** (LLMs a plus): evaluation, iteration, and real-world edge cases—not just demos. * **Comfort with ambiguity and strong product instincts**: you can turn fuzzy problems into crisp plans using customer context and data. ## **Benefits** * **Comprehensive Health Plans:** Stream fully covers 100% of the premium for medical, dental, and vision coverage for all full-time employees. * **401(k) Retirement Plan:** A 401(k) plan with diverse investment options to help you save and plan for your future. * **Paid Parental Leave:** Generous paid parental leave for all full-time employees. * **Flexible PTO:** A flexible, generous PTO policy for salaried employees—we encourage everyone to recharge. * **In-Office Collaboration:** In person four days per week in our Mission District office. * **Compensation and Equity:** Competitive salaries and meaningful equity for all full-time employees. * **Daily Catered Lunch:** Lunch catered on in-office days. * **Team & Culture:** Monthly team outings and a highly curious, mission-driven team. * **…and much more!**
Job details are sourced from the employer's original posting.
Open job postingAbout the company
Stream is a leading provider of real-time messaging infrastructure, offering robust chat and activity feed APIs for developers. Their platform is built with Go and utilizes technologies like CockroachDB/Postgres, RocksDB, Raft, and Redis to power chat for many large applications such as Strava, Nextdoor, Patreon, IBM, Adobe, and Midjourney. Stream offers a 10-week internal onboarding program to train engineers on Go and scalability.