[Hiring] Staff Backend Engineer @HR Acuity

Role Description

Apply established coding standards, architectural patterns, SOLID principles, and unit/behavioral test automation practices to directly contribute to product development.

• Own the architecture for medium-to-high complexity .NET-based features and system-level functionality, balancing new development with support of existing functionality.
• Build reusable code and libraries for future use.
• Translate complex Product requirements into scalable, performant, and well-architected technical designs; lead architecture and design reviews and critiques for the team.
• Evaluate architectural trade-offs — build vs. buy, monolith vs. microservice, sync vs. async — and make sound, well-reasoned decisions that hold up as the system scales.
• Lead or contribute to the overall engineering architecture beyond your own team's boundaries, and act as a go-to for diagnosing and resolving system-level challenges — scalability bottlenecks, cross-service integration issues, and reliability risks that span multiple components.
• Optimize services for maximum speed and scalability.
• Provide technical leadership and mentorship to junior and mid-level engineers while continuing to deliver high-quality code personally.
• Collaborate with team members and stakeholders; occasionally engage with customers or external teams, including customer escalations as needed.
• Work with development and product teams to understand, estimate, and refine requirements for product features and stories.
• Perform code reviews and help set the bar for best practices and coding standards across the team.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of engineering experience
• 5+ years of experience working on large-scale distributed event-based SaaS applications
• World-class design and programming skills with deep expertise in .NET preferred; Go and TypeScript are great to have
• Proven architecture ability — demonstrated experience designing systems from the ground up, evaluating trade-offs, and making decisions that hold up at scale; comfortable owning and defending architectural decisions in front of peers and leadership
• Experience working closely with DevOps to deliver software through CI/CD pipelines into containerized hosting environments, ideally on Kubernetes
• Tangible experience with Kafka or another event streaming platform, with an understanding of the benefits and challenges of asynchronously integrating services through these platforms
• Extensive experience with relational, NoSQL, and other datastores, with the ability to speak in depth about when and why to choose one vs. another
• Experience building cloud-native solutions using Azure, AWS, or another cloud provider
• Experience automating testing at all levels of the stack (unit tests, integration tests, regression tests, etc.)
• Comfort using feature flags to incrementally enable functionality across the customer base
• Appreciation for the operational aspects of SaaS engineering, including experience with incident management and using SLOs and other system observability techniques to proactively understand system health
• Experience decomposing monolithic applications and databases into microservices
• Strong troubleshooting and performance tuning skills
• 1+ (ideally 2+) years of experience with AI developer tools (e.g. Cursor, Windsurf, Claude Code)
• Experience with React or other modern UI frameworks is a plus, but not a requirement
• BS in Computer Science or related technical field, or equivalent experience, preferred

Requirements

• Adept at managing your time with clear, organized thinking
• Strong teamwork and coordination skills, with the ability to drive consensus and create clarity from ambiguity
• Comfortable working independently on any task and comfortably makes commitments outside their immediate team
• Thinks about the impact of the whole team, especially less experienced engineers, and takes responsibility for the team's effectiveness beyond their own work