Senior Software Engineer - Backend Platform

📋 Job Overview

Hi, I'm Manu, Engineering Manager at Customer.io. We're looking for experienced backend engineers who want to build and own the infrastructure that powers one of the most data-intensive platforms in marketing automation — systems that process millions of events per second, orchestrate complex workflows at scale, and keep everything running reliably for thousands of customers worldwide.

🏢 About Customer.io

Over 9,000 companies - from scrappy startups to global brands - use our platform to send billions of emails, push notifications, in-app messages, and SMS every day. Customer.io powers automated communication that people actually want to receive.

We help teams send smarter, more relevant messages using real-time behavioral data. Under the hood: Go, React, Ember and AI help us ship fast and scale with confidence.

🎯 The Role

You'll work on the Platform team, tackling hard distributed systems problems: designing for fault tolerance, scaling services under real production pressure, and building the foundational layers that every other team at Customer.io depends on. This isn't just maintenance work — you'll shape the architecture of systems that need to be both highly available and constantly evolving.

✅ Key Responsibilities

• Design and evolve distributed systems in Go to handle billions of daily events and messages and store and index petabytes of data
• Lead architectural decisions around performance, reliability, and real-time event processing
• Improve service-to-service communication through better APIs, messaging systems, and event-driven patterns
• Work across teams to uncover bottlenecks and system issues, and lead initiatives to resolve them for a smoother customer experience
• Tackle high-throughput challenges across data pipelines, queues, and scheduling infrastructure
• Able to debug production systems at scale using effective instrumentation, and resolve issues quickly and confidently
• Share knowledge and raise the bar through sharing your progress publicly with short videos, thoughtful writing, and mentorship
• Leverage AI tools to prototype, move faster, and make better decisions

📌 Required Qualifications

• Significant experience (typically 10+ years) building scalable, distributed systems in Go (or similar statically typed languages)
• Deep experience with databases - relational (MySQL, Postgres) and non-relational (DynamoDB, BigTable) - and how to make them fast
• Comfort working in cloud-native environments (AWS, GCP)
• Familiarity with APIs, observability, and operating production systems
• A bias for action over perfection, and pride in owning technical decisions

⭐ Desirable Experience

• Deep experience with distributed systems and large-scale backend architecture
• Strong instincts around reliability, observability, and fault tolerance
• Comfort reasoning about performance, capacity, and trade-offs at scale
• Experience with event-driven systems, message queues, or data pipelines is a plus
• A collaborative mindset — you raise the team around you

🎁 Benefits

We believe in transparency. Starting salary for this role is $150,000 - $200,000 USD (or equivalent in local currency) depending on experience and subject to market rate adjustment.

We know our people are what make us great, and we’re committed to taking great care of them. Our inclusive benefits package supports your well-being and growth, including 100% coverage of medical, dental, vision, mental health, and supplemental insurance premiums for you and your family. We also offer 16 weeks paid parental leave, unlimited PTO, stipends for remote work and wellness, a professional development budget, and more.

🛂 Visa & Eligibility

Customer.io recognizes the stifling impact of systemic injustice on diverse communities. We commit to using our influence to increase inclusion and equity within the tech industry. We strive to build an inclusive team culture, implement bias-free hiring practices, and develop community partnerships to expand our global impact.