Staff Software Engineer, Backend
About this role
Staff Software Engineer, Backend
About Stream
Stream powers real-time Chat, Video, Activity Feeds, and AI Moderation for more than 1 billion end users across 4,000+ apps, from Strava and Bumble to eBay and Patreon. Our platform processes billions of API requests per month and supports applications with millions of concurrent users, while delivering highly reliable, low-latency services and a great developer experience.
The role
We’re looking for Staff Software Engineers. You’ll join our Chat or Activity Feeds team and own backend systems that thousands of developers build their products on, from how they’re structured to how they scale.
This is a full-time role based in our Amsterdam (visa & relocation support possible), Toronto, or Skopje office. We are also open to hiring the right person remote from the EU.
About you
You’ve built backend systems at high scale and stayed long enough to live with your own decisions, good and bad. You care about how a system is structured, not only the next feature, and you can explain your trade-offs to the people who’ll live with them. Maybe you led a team for a few years and chose to go back to hands-on work. That’s welcome here: this is an individual contributor role, and you’ll write code and touch databases yourself. Our leads spend about 80% of their time hands-on too. You won’t enjoy it if you want to manage people, or if you’d rather stay away from infrastructure and database work.
We’re also hiring Senior Engineers on these teams. If your experience fits Senior better than Staff, we’ll say so openly and talk it through with you.
You have
Extensive backend engineering experience, including technical leadership on systems in production.
Proficiency in Go, Python, or in another backend language plus the willingness to switch to Go.
Experience building features used by a large number of users, and scaling them as usage grows.
Strong experience with a relational database. We use PostgreSQL, but any relational database counts.
Hands-on experience with Redis or a similar in-memory data store.
Experience building public APIs or SDKs that other developers use.
Comfort with infrastructure and database work as part of your normal week, including Kubernetes.
Good written and spoken English. It’s our working language.
Bonus points
PostgreSQL in production at scale, including sharding, partitioning or large migrations.
Experience improving or redesigning legacy parts of a system that’s serving live traffic.
Go and gRPC in production at high request rates.
Messaging, feeds or other real-time systems, or message queues such as RabbitMQ or Kafka.
Distributed storage internals, such as Raft or RocksDB.
You’ve cut infrastructure cost at a company where margins mattered.
Experience running workloads on GCP or AWS.
Don’t worry if you haven’t used every tool we run. You’ll get exposure to most of them, and you’re welcome to convince us to add your favorites.
What makes this role exciting
Scale: more than 1 billion end users and billions of API requests a month go through the systems you’ll own.
Impact: cost per message and query latency show up directly in our margins and in the apps of customers like Strava and Patreon.
Stack: Go, gRPC, RocksDB and Python; PostgreSQL and RabbitMQ; GCP and Kubernetes; Grafana, Prometheus, ELK (Elasticsearch and Kibana), Jaeger and Tempo for distributed tracing, and Datadog; Redis, Valkey and Memcached.
Starting point: you’ll ship to production in your first weeks and own a meaningful area within your first months.
What we offer
Generous compensation
Stock options
Amsterdam office benefits:
28 days paid time off plus Dutch public holidays.
Pension plan with a company contribution.
NS Business Card or a company bike, covered by Stream.
EUR 500 per year for personal development.
Catered lunches in the office.
MacBook Pro.
Up to EUR 60 a month toward a gym or sports club membership of your choice.
Relocation support if you move to Amsterdam, including visa sponsorship as a recognised IND sponsor.
Toronto, Skopje and remote EU: local benefits depending on your country of employment.
Why join Stream?
We’re a Series B company with offices in Boulder, Amsterdam, Skopje and Toronto, and a team of 140+ people from 37 nationalities. We’re backed by Felicis Ventures, GGV Capital, 01 Advisors, Techstars, and Arthur Ventures, with angels including Dick Costolo (ex-CEO of Twitter), Olivier Pomel (CEO of Datadog), Tom Preston-Werner (co-founder of GitHub), and Nicolas Dessaigne (co-founder of Algolia).
We’ll be straight with you: a startup is more demanding than a large company. There’s no fixed playbook, you’ll own things end to end, and you’ll sometimes pick up work outside your title. That’s also what makes it a fast place to grow. If you want real ownership and high scale more than structure and a set career ladder, you’ll feel at home here.
Hybrid office policy: applicants based (or relocating to) one of our office locations are expected to work according to the applicable local office attendance policy.
Equal opportunity employer statement: Stream provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws.
This policy applies to all terms and conditions of employment, including recruiting, hiring, placement, promotion, termination, layoff, recall, transfer, leaves of absence, compensation and training.
Note for external recruiters: We currently have this role covered and do not accept unsolicited agency resumes. We are not responsible for any fees related to unsolicited resumes.
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