Staff Software Engineer, Backend Platform

Patreon is a media and community platform where over 300,000 creators give their biggest fans access to exclusive work and experiences. The Backend Platform team builds the foundational systems and infrastructure that power Patreon's creator platform, including core backend services, APIs, databases, infrastructure, and developer tooling.

In this Staff role, you will design and drive technical solutions for key systems, lead architecture and implementation of scalable distributed systems, APIs, event-driven systems, and platform services, and contribute to modernization efforts across backend architecture, service boundaries, and data access patterns. You will help establish technical standards and best practices around reliability, performance, scalability, and maintainability, partner with product engineering teams to align platform capabilities with business needs, drive technical decision-making, and evolve operational maturity around incident management, resiliency, and production excellence. You will also mentor senior and mid-level engineers through design reviews, technical guidance, and hands-on collaboration.

Requirements include significant experience building large-scale backend systems with depth in distributed systems and platform architecture (typically 6-8+ years or equivalent), strong expertise in distributed systems, high-throughput APIs, and low-latency architectures, experience with databases, caching systems, and storage technologies (e.g., MySQL, Postgres, Redis, DynamoDB), strong understanding of data modeling, storage systems, caching, queues, and event-driven architectures, experience in performance optimization across APIs, databases, caching layers, and distributed services, operational excellence including incident response and production debugging, experience operating systems in cloud-native environments such as AWS and Kubernetes-based infrastructure, and proficiency in one or more backend languages such as Python, Go, Java, or Rust.

The role can be based in San Francisco or New York, with a hybrid work model requiring in-office presence 3 days per week. Patreon offers a competitive benefits package including salary, equity plans, healthcare, flexible time off, company holidays and recharge days, commuter benefits, lifestyle stipends, learning and development stipends, parental leave, and a 401k plan with matching.