Staff Software Engineer

About the company Our client is a fast-growing financial technology company. The role Raydar is recruiting for this role on behalf of our client. Own the design and architecture of core backend systems for a real-time product, taking features from first design through to live production. Contribute across the entire product in a compact, office-based engineering team, with emphasis on speed and resilience. What you'll do - Design and own core backend systems for low-latency, real-time services. - Drive performance and reliability improvements using event-driven designs and parallel processing. - Collaborate with a small engineering group and company founders across infrastructure, backend and reliability work. - Deploy, operate and scale fault-tolerant distributed systems on container orchestration. - Take features from initial design through to live production, often within days. - Help build and refine machine learning systems that improve from ongoing feedback. Requirements What we're looking for - At least 3 years of professional software engineering experience. - Computer Science degree. - Prior work building fast, time-sensitive backend or full-stack software. - Strong database design and performance optimization skills. - Solid grasp of how multi-node software stays available and recovers from failures. - Hands-on history of carrying backend services from build through to running in production, with full accountability. - Comfort owning design and architecture across an entire product. - Familiarity with AI and large language models. - Backend or full-stack experience rather than frontend work alone. Bonus points - Four or more years of experience. - Background in creating or running machine learning models in live environments. - Startup, founder or mid-size company experience, including after a large technology company. - Python experience. - A degree from a strong university computer science program. Benefits Compensation and benefits - Base salary: USD 250K to 320K - Equity Location and work model - San Francisco, California, United States - On-site, 5 days a week - Full-time