Staff Software Engineer (Backend)

The Opportunity

Kargo is hiring a Staff Software Engineer to own technical direction across backend services and shared platform capabilities—translating ambiguous business needs into durable architecture and reliable execution. Kargo's systems move fast and operate at scale, and this role exists to make sure they hold up under both. This is a hybrid role requiring onsite presence 4 days per week.

The Daily To-Do

• Define service boundaries, interfaces, and design patterns across multiple systems, establishing shared standards teams reference rather than solving the same problems independently
• Lead cross-team technical initiatives from discovery through production rollout with strong observability, documented tradeoffs, and a clean post-launch record
• Identify and address structural platform weaknesses—through targeted refactors, new reference implementations, or infrastructure investments—with impact visible in reliability and performance metrics
• Improve engineering effectiveness across teams through tooling, testing strategy, and documentation contributions that reduce friction in the development cycle
• Take loosely defined product or business problems and produce clear, actionable technical plans—knowing when to move fast, when to invest, and when to hold
• Lead design reviews and technical discussions that bring teams to strong decisions without relying on formal authority or slowing momentum
• Invest in the development of senior engineers, helping them expand their scope and technical influence while staying close enough to the code to lead by example

Qualifications

• Deep proficiency in Go (or a 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—treating observability and post-launch iteration as first-class parts of the engineering process
• 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
• Preferred: familiarity with RTB, SSP, or auction systems—or other performance-sensitive distributed platforms where latency, throughput, and cost must be actively balanced—and experience building shared internal platforms adopted across multiple engineering teams