[Hiring] Staff Software Engineer @Customer.io

Role Description

We're looking for a staff engineer to set technical direction for the systems that move billions of messages a day. This isn't a role about shipping more, faster. It's about deciding what gets built, where the architecture needs to go next, and raising the ceiling for the engineers around you.

What You'll Do

• Shape the technical direction of our distributed messaging systems in Go — making the high-level architectural calls on mission-critical services where scale, cost, and reliability are all in tension.
• Take on ambiguous, high-stakes problems that cross squad and function boundaries, and drive them to a decision when the right answer isn't obvious to anyone yet.
• Build consensus on contested technical questions across teams, and communicate the tradeoffs clearly enough that senior leadership can act on them.
• Raise the department's bar — set quality and design standards, mentor senior engineers, and turn what you know into frameworks and documentation other teams can use without you in the room.
• Drive engineering process and tooling improvements that span multiple squads, not just your own.
• Interview and calibrate against our career ladder, giving honest, evidence-based assessments of candidates.
• Use AI agents to make multi-file changes by scoping the work, writing the prompt, and verifying the output.

Qualifications

• 10+ years building scalable, distributed systems in Go (or similar statically typed languages), including several as the person others turned to on architecture.
• Depth across multiple systems or domains, not just one — you've been the recognized expert in more than one place.
• A track record of designing for production reality: you quantify tradeoffs in throughput, cost, and reliability rather than picking a reasonable path and defending it.
• Experience designing observability and recovery as first-class concerns — metrics, alerting, rollback, backpressure, checkpointing — not logging added afterward.
• Comfort working in cloud-native environments (AWS, GCP), with relational databases (we use MySQL) and a real understanding of performance tradeoffs.
• Evidence of making other engineers better: mentorship, technical writing, design review, standards that outlasted your involvement.
• A bias for action over perfection, and the judgment to know which decisions are worth slowing down for.

Compensation & Benefits

• Starting salary for this role is $200,000 - $240,000 USD (or equivalent in local currency) depending on experience and subject to market rate adjustment.
• This role also carries a 10% annual bonus target.
• 100% coverage of medical, dental, vision, mental health, and supplemental insurance premiums for you and your family.
• 16 weeks paid parental leave.
• Unlimited PTO.
• Stipends for remote work and wellness.
• A professional development budget.
• More benefits available.

Our Process

• Application: We review everyone with care. Tell us why you're interested.
• Recruiter Call (30 mins): Let's chat about what you're looking for and how we work.
• Hiring Manager Interview (60 mins): Talk with one of our hiring managers about your working style and a project you've owned end-to-end, plus a short AI-assisted coding exercise.
• Architecture Interview (60 mins): A collaborative system design conversation focused on scaling challenges, tradeoffs, and failure modes.
• Take-Home Assignment: Complete a short, realistic task similar to what you'd work on here.
• Assignment Review Call (60 mins): Walk us through your work and discuss tradeoffs, priorities, and how you'd iterate.

Join Us!

If you're excited by what you read and want to build software that makes communication better for everyone—apply now.