The work is distributed systems in practice rather than in theory: request orchestration, failure isolation, caching, latency budgets, capacity planning, and the observability to know what is actually happening in production. The team is small enough that engineers own problems end to end, from design through on-call.
ABOUT YOU
You're a staff-level engineer who wants to own systems, not tickets. You've built high-traffic, low-latency Python services and carried the pager for them. You think in trade-offs: latency versus cost, flexibility versus a public API that customers can't afford to see break, the fix that ships this week versus the architecture that has to last two years. You can lead work that spans several engineers and several quarters, you enjoy mentoring others, and you're fine when a problem shows up half-defined. You don't mind being the one who reads the spec for some unfamiliar protocol, works out how it fits, and designs an integration that holds up at scale. You change your mind when someone has a better argument, you make the people around you better, and you still care about your code long after it merges.
WHAT YOU WILL DO
Own the technical direction of one or more of our services - architecture, performance, and reliability.
Lead design of new systems and public APIs, and the evolution of existing ones as traffic and feature scope grow.
Raise the engineering bar through design and code review, and mentor mid and senior engineers into owning bigger scopes.
Partner with product, other engineering teams, and solutions/support to shape what we build and to represent search constraints and trade-offs honestly.
Take part in on-call for the systems you own, and lead incident response and follow-through when things break.
WHAT WE ARE LOOKING FOR
TECHNICAL
Substantial experience building and operating high-traffic, low-latency backend services in production.
Extensive Python knowledge (our primary language).
Experience with observability and performance work in live systems.
Experience designing and evolving public APIs that external customers depend on.
Experience designing & implementing scalable service-oriented architectures.
BEYOND THE CODE
Track record of leading projects that span multiple engineers and quarters.
Influence without authority, and willingness to change your position when someone has a better argument.
Clear written communication - design docs, RFCs, postmortems.
Good judgment about trade-offs and scope.
Comfort with ambiguity and loosely defined problems.
Ownership that extends past merge, to how the system behaves in production.
NICE TO HAVE
Experience with AWS
Background in search, ranking, information retrieval, or e-commerce product discovery.
Exposure to AI/LLM-facing infrastructure (MCP, agent tooling, or similar).
BENEFITS
🏝️ Unlimited vacation time - we strongly encourage all of our employees take at least 3 weeks per year
🌎 Fully remote team - choose where you live
🛋️ Work from home stipend! We want you to have the resources you need to set up your home office
💻 Apple laptops provided for new employees
🧑🎓 Training and development budget for every employee, refreshed each year
👪 Maternity & Paternity leave for qualified employees
🧠 Work with smart people who will help you grow and make a meaningful impact
💵 Base salary: $110k–$130k USD, depending on knowledge, skills, experience, and interview results
📈 Stock options - offered in addition to the base salary
🎉 Regular team offsites to connect and collaborate
DIVERSITY, EQUITY, AND INCLUSION AT CONSTRUCTOR
At Constructor.io http://Constructor.io we are committed to cultivating a work environment that is diverse, equitable, and inclusive. As an equal opportunity employer, we welcome individuals of all backgrounds and provide equal opportunities to all applicants regardless of their education, diversity of opinion, race, color, religion, gender, gender expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, disability, age, veteran status or affiliation in any other protected group.
Studies have shown that women and people of color may be less likely to apply for jobs unless they meet every one of the qualifications listed. Our primary interest is in finding the best candidate for the job. We encourage you to apply even if you don’t meet all of our listed qualifications.
How we handle your data. By submitting this application, you acknowledge that Constructor will collect and process the personal data you provide for the purpose of evaluating your candidacy for this role. If you are not selected, we will retain your data for a limited period as described in our Recruitment Privacy Notice. After that period your data will be deleted or anonymized.
How we handle your data. By submitting this application, you acknowledge that Constructor will collect and process the personal data you provide for the purpose of evaluating your candidacy for this role. If you are not selected, we will retain your data for a limited period as described in our Recruitment Privacy Notice https://constructor.com/recruitment-privacy-notice. After that period your data will be deleted or anonymized.
