Staff Engineer Platform

Are you a highly experienced technical leader passionate about defining the architectural standards, driving cross-team collaboration, and ensuring the long-term health of a complex, mission-critical platform in a high-growth SaaS environment?

We are seeking a Staff Engineer Platform & Integrations to operate as a central technical authority, responsible for the scaling strategy, organizational alignment, and engineering excellence across Carv's backend systems. While maintaining deep domain expertise in our core integration platform (ATS, VoIP, etc.), your scope will extend to setting the technical direction and elevating the practices of multiple engineering teams, ensuring our platform can support exponential data growth and feature velocity.

This role is ideal for a strategic systems thinker who thrives on solving organization-wide architectural challenges, aligning multiple teams around a unified technical vision, and establishing the engineering culture that defines platform reliability and quality.

About Carv

Carv is a fast-growing startup in the recruitment tech space, dedicated to revolutionizing the way recruiters operate through innovative AI-driven solutions. Our product helps recruiters reduce their administrative burdens, allowing them to focus on connecting with talent.

Key Responsibilities

This role operates as a central technical authority, responsible for the scaling strategy, organizational alignment, and engineering excellence across Carv's entire backend system. The Staff Engineer acts as a bridge between multiple teams, ensuring a unified technical vision for a high-growth SaaS platform.

1. Cross-Team Strategy & Architectural Alignment (Cross-Team Focus)

• Organizational Technical Vision: Define and communicate the long-term technical vision and architectural roadmap that spans multiple engineering domain teams, ensuring cohesive evolution of the entire platform.
• Driving Consensus: Lead cross-functional architecture review processes, serving as the final technical sign-off on major design decisions that impact system reliability, security, and scalability.
• Strategic Project Ownership: Own the end-to-end delivery of high-leverage, organization-wide technical projects (e.g., migrating to a new database, major security initiatives, global infrastructure scaling).

2. Engineering Excellence & Standards (Excellence Focus)

• API Product Strategy & Governance: Spearhead the design and governance of Carv's external-facing API. Define the architectural standards, versioning strategy, and developer experience to treat the API as a first-class product.
• Platform Reliability & Performance: Lead cross-team efforts to improve reliability, performance, and observability of our core platform. Collaborate on defining and evolving meaningful SLOs/SLIs, and help teams adopt best practices that make the system more resilient and predictable over time.
• Tooling & Productivity: Define and champion the standards for our CI/CD pipelines, Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) practices (using Terraform/GCP), and centralized logging/monitoring. Develop or procure internal tooling that significantly boosts the productivity and quality output of all engineering teams.
• Code Quality & Security: Institute, document, and enforce code quality standards, security best practices, and secure design patterns across the entire backend organization. Conduct regular deep-dive code reviews on high-risk, high-impact services.
• Incident Management: Act as an escalation point for the most complex, systemic production incidents, leading post-mortems and driving follow-up work across teams to prevent recurrence.

3. AI Strategy & LLM Leadership (Product & Excellence Focus)

• AI Productization: Drive the engineering strategy for integrating Large Language Models (LLMs) and other advanced AI services directly into the core product offering. Ensure we architect a scalable, cost-efficient, and best-in-class AI experience by evaluating model performance, latency, reliability, and security of external and proprietary AI endpoints.
• Internal AI Enablement: Champion the adoption of LLMs and AI services to significantly improve engineering productivity and operational excellence. This includes leading initiatives to integrate AI into development workflows (e.g., code generation, sophisticated search), automated reporting, data analysis, and intelligent monitoring systems.

4. Technical Leadership & Mentorship

• Technical Advisor: Serve as the primary technical consultant for product managers and senior leadership, translating complex business problems into sound technical execution strategies.
• Skill Elevation: Proactively mentor Senior and Mid-level engineers through coaching, pair-programming, and hosting specialized workshops (Communities of Practice) on complex topics like distributed systems, advanced GCP usage, and architectural trade-offs.
• Research & Innovation: Continuously research and pilot emerging technologies, platforms, and best practices to maintain Carv's technical advantage in AI-driven recruitment technology.

What's in it for you?

Join Carv at a pivotal growth stage, impacting the EU & USA markets. Work directly with a seasoned leadership team with 20+ years of experience in recruitment tech/SaaS.

On top of that, you get:

• Unlimited paid time off
• Highly competitive salary
• Significant company stock options
• Generous personal development budget
• Hybrid work environment

• Opportunities for leadership and mentorship

• 8+ years of progressive experience in backend development, with a significant portion of that time operating in a Staff, Principal, or equivalent technical leadership role, demonstrating impact across multiple teams.

• Proven Track Record: Experience designing, launching, and operating high-availability, mission-critical distributed systems and microservices architectures at a massive scale.
• System-Wide Thinking: Demonstrated ability to define complex architectural strategies (API design, data modeling, event streaming) and gain buy-in across diverse engineering stakeholders.

Deep Technical and Platform Expertise

• Cloud-Native Master: Expert-level proficiency in designing and implementing provider-agnostic cloud-native architectures. Deep understanding of containerization (e.g., Kubernetes, Docker), serverless computing, distributed systems patterns, and networking/security within modern cloud environments (GCP, AWS, Azure, etc.). Experience with Infrastructure as Code (IaC) using tools like Terraform for multi-cloud or hybrid environments.
• Language & Paradigms: Expert proficiency in multiple high-level languages, specifically with hands-on experience in TypeScript and Python. Deep expertise in system design, object-oriented programming, functional programming paradigms, and selecting the right language/tool for the job based on performance, ecosystem, and maintainability. Advanced API design (REST/gRPC/GraphQL) is essential.
• Integration & API Product Specialization: Expert experience in architecting and managing scalable integrations and defining public API architecture to support both internal and external developer ecosystems. Demonstrable experience integrating and managing external AI/ML services (like LLMs) into production systems.

Organizational Impact and Communication

• Exceptional Communication: Highly developed ability to articulate complex technical ideas clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences, influencing technical roadmaps at the executive level.
• Strategic Optimization: Exceptional analytical and troubleshooting skills with a proven ability to solve ambiguous, complex architectural problems that span team boundaries.
• Culture Driver: A demonstrated commitment to fostering a culture of technical excellence, continuous learning, and blamelessness in incident management.

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