Staff Software Engineer (Backend)

Kargo•New York, NY

4d•$180,000 - $230,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Kargo creates powerful moments of connection between brands and consumers to build businesses. Every day, our 600+ employees work to radically raise the bar on what agentic AI, CTV, eCommerce, social, and mobile can do to deliver unique ad experiences across the world’s most premium platforms. Taking a creative science approach to all we do, we continuously innovate solutions that outperform industry benchmarks and client expectations. Now 20+ years strong, Kargo has offices in NYC, Chicago, LA, Dallas, Sydney, Auckland, London and Waterford, Ireland. Techies who want to build the future. Creatives who want to design it better. Communicators to win business. Collaborators to build it. Data pros who turn numbers into insights. Product builders who turn ideas into innovations. Anyone eager to be on a team that doesn’t stop to ask what’s next, because they’re already building it. Kargo's systems move fast and operate at scale — this role exists to make sure they hold up under both. The Staff Software Engineer owns technical direction across backend services and shared platform capabilities, translating ambiguous business needs into durable architecture and reliable execution. Without this role, complexity compounds silently and engineering teams lose the leverage they need to ship with confidence. This is a hybrid role requiring onsite presence 4 days per week.

Requirements

Deep proficiency in Go (or comparable systems/compiled language) with production experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems
Strong systems design fundamentals: APIs, service architecture, concurrency, data modeling, fault tolerance, and performance
Hands-on experience with Docker, Kubernetes, and AWS in production environments
Operational instincts across monitoring, debugging, incident response, and systemic follow-through
Demonstrated ability to lead complex, cross-team technical initiatives from problem definition through production rollout
Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to explain technical tradeoffs to non-technical stakeholders

Nice To Haves

Familiarity with RTB, SSP, or auction systems — or other performance-sensitive distributed platforms where latency, throughput, and cost must be actively balanced
Experience building shared internal platforms or frameworks adopted across multiple engineering teams

Responsibilities

Owns technical direction across backend services and shared platform capabilities.
Translates ambiguous business needs into durable architecture and reliable execution.
Drives alignment across architecture, ensuring service boundaries, interfaces, and design patterns are clearly defined across multiple systems.
Leads major cross-team technical initiatives from discovery through production rollout, ensuring strong observability, documented tradeoffs, and a clean post-launch record.
Identifies and addresses structural weaknesses in platform health through targeted refactors, new reference implementations, or infrastructure investments.
Improves engineering effectiveness across teams through tooling improvements, testing strategy, and documentation contributions.
Invests in the development of senior engineers, helping them take on broader technical ownership and influence.
Leads design reviews and technical discussions.
Establishes reusable patterns and reference implementations.
Treats observability, incident management, and post-launch iteration as first-class parts of the engineering process.
Identifies systemic risk early and makes sound calls on whether to patch, refactor, or redesign.
Makes high-leverage contributions when it counts.