Staff Backend Engineer - Platform & Intelligence

Search Atlas•San Francisco, CA

14h•$200,000 - $280,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Search Atlas hit $32M ARR bootstrapped. No VC. No safety net. Just systems that handle millions of crawls daily, terabytes of search data, and AI agents making autonomous decisions in milliseconds. Our backend is the nervous system of agentic marketing. When our AI decides to optimize a Fortune 500's technical SEO, your code executes that decision. When we process 10x more pages next year, your architecture makes it possible. We need a Staff Backend Engineer who codes like a senior IC and thinks like a founder. You'll own critical systems, mentor the team through shipping, and make architectural calls that define our trajectory. This is high-ownership backend engineering at scale. San Francisco. In-person energy. Ship-or-die velocity.

Requirements

You've built backend systems that handle serious scale - and you can prove it.
7+ years shipping Python in production environments. Django REST Framework is second nature.
Deep PostgreSQL expertise - query optimization, indexing strategies, replication, partitioning. You understand execution plans and lock contention.
Celery at scale - task queue architecture, worker optimization, monitoring, and failure handling in high-volume environments.
API craft - REST design, OpenAPI/DRF Spectacular, versioning strategies, backward compatibility.
DevOps fluency - Docker, Kubernetes, CI/CD pipelines. You don't need to be SRE, but you can debug a pod, optimize a build, and read Terraform.
Observability mindset - Sentry, Datadog, Grafana. You build systems that tell you when they're breaking before users do.
Leadership through code - mentoring experience, code review culture, technical decision-making that the team trusts.

Nice To Haves

Experience with ClickHouse or analytical databases.
Search infrastructure (crawling, indexing, ranking).
AI/ML backend systems (LLM APIs, vector databases).
MarTech or SEO domain knowledge.

Responsibilities

Ship Performant Systems
Build and own Django REST applications that handle high-throughput, data-intensive workloads. Your APIs are fast, documented, and battle tested.
Design Celery task architectures that process millions of background jobs without dropping data. You understand idempotency, retry strategies, and dead letter queues.
Optimize PostgreSQL at scale. Query tuning, index strategy, connection pooling, partitioning - you don't just write ORM calls, you own database performance.
Architect for 10x
Make architectural decisions that scale from millions to billions of operations. Microservices extraction, data pipeline redesign, caching strategies, async patterns.
Contribute to platform-wide standards that make the entire engineering team faster and more reliable.
Review code with depth - you catch race conditions, N+1 queries, and architectural anti-patterns before they hit production.
Lead by Shipping
Mentor engineers through code reviews, pair programming, and technical guidance. You elevate the team's output by elevating their craft.
Partner with Product, Frontend, and DevOps to deliver end-to-end features. You don't throw specs over walls; you co-own outcomes.
Drive engineering excellence: TDD, linting (Black, Flake8, isort), test coverage enforcement, CI/CD optimization.
Own Observability
Build systems you can debug at 3am. Sentry, Datadog, Grafana - you instrument everything, create actionable alerts, and fix root causes, not symptoms.
Identify performance bottlenecks across the stack. Profile, measure, optimize. Latency is a feature you own.