AustinWorks ยท 7 hours ago
Principal Backend Platform Engineer
San Francisco Bay Area
Full-time
Hybrid
Lead/Staff
$220K/yr - $260K/yrAustinWorks is a fast-growing technology company building a mission-critical backend platform for large enterprise customers. The Principal Backend Platform Engineer will lead the design of core platform services and influence the technical direction while addressing complex scale, reliability, and performance challenges.
Staffing & Recruiting
Hiring Manager
Charlie Austin
Responsibilities
Architect and build distributed backend systems with a focus on scalability, reliability, and fault tolerance
Design and own core platform services (APIs, async processing, data pipelines, shared infrastructure) used across multiple product teams
Lead system design efforts involving high-throughput, low-latency, multi-tenant architectures
Drive decisions around service decomposition, data consistency, resilience, and performance optimization
Own production systems end to end, including capacity planning, observability, incident response, and reliability improvements
Partner with engineering, product, and infrastructure teams to align platform capabilities with business needs
Act as a technical leader and mentor, raising the bar on system design and operational excellence
Qualification
Required
Deep experience building and operating large-scale backend or platform systems in production
Strong understanding of distributed systems concepts (e.g., async messaging, replication, partitioning, consistency tradeoffs)
Proven ability to design scalable APIs and microservices that handle real production load
Experience with cloud-native architectures (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and modern backend infrastructure
Hands-on background with technologies such as message queues, streaming systems, distributed data stores, or workflow engines
Clear track record of technical ownership, system-level thinking, and production accountability
Comfortable operating at Principal / Senior Staff scope without people management
Preferred
Experience designing systems with measurable scale (QPS, latency targets, large data volumes, or multi-region deployments)
Background in platform, infrastructure, or data-heavy systems
Prior work in high-growth or enterprise-facing environments
Benefits
Meaningful equity
Company
AustinWorks
Proven experience recruiting for technical talent with speed, precision and no bull.
0-1 employees
Funding
Current Stage
Early StageCompany data provided by crunchbase