# Staff Software Engineer, Platform

**Company**: Gamma
**Location**: San Francisco
**Work arrangement**: onsite
**Experience**: staff
**Job type**: Full time
**Salary**: $230K - $310K
**Category**: Engineering
**Industry**: Technology
**Wikidata**: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q2294120

**Apply**: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/gamma/fac868a4-1b7e-435c-b3d4-df3951c65608
**Canonical**: https://yubhub.co/jobs/job_71eabf41-e22

## Description

## About the role

You'll own critical platform infrastructure supporting 70M+ users and scaling to hundreds of millions. This means architecting the core data model and storage systems powering Gamma's business, building real-time collaborative editing systems, high-volume event pipelines, and public APIs while driving technical strategy for databases, caching layers, distributed systems, and observability.

As a Staff Engineer on the Platform team, you'll define engineering standards and best practices across backend teams while mentoring engineers on system design, scalability patterns, and production excellence. You'll make critical build vs buy decisions, balance technical debt paydown with feature velocity, and collaborate with leadership to shape our multi-year platform roadmap.

## What you'll do

- Architect and scale core platform systems including databases, caching layers, event pipelines, and public APIs for 70M+ users

- Lead major infrastructure initiatives: database migrations, architecture refactors, and performance optimization at scale

- Define engineering standards and best practices across backend teams

- Mentor engineers on system design, scalability patterns, and production excellence

- Make build-vs-buy decisions and balance technical debt paydown with feature velocity

- Collaborate with leadership to shape Gamma's multi-year platform roadmap

## What you'll bring

- 7+ years of backend engineering experience with deep expertise in distributed systems and data infrastructure, and a proven track record of architecting systems that scaled through multiple orders of magnitude

- Expert-level proficiency in scalable APIs, databases (PostgreSQL, Redis), and event-driven architectures

- Experience with real-time systems such as collaborative editing, WebSockets, CRDTs, or similar conflict resolution approaches

- Strong operational chops: monitoring, alerting, incident response, and performance debugging at scale, with proficiency in backend technologies like Node.js, Python, or similar

- Product-minded technical judgment, with the ability to make decisions that unlock business value and user experience

- Experience building platform infrastructure at high-growth startups, or working with AI infrastructure or public API design (Nice to have)

## Compensation range:

The base salary for this full-time position, which spans multiple internal levels depending on qualifications, ranges between $230K - $310K plus benefits & equity.

## Skills

### Required
- backend engineering
- distributed systems
- data infrastructure
- scalable APIs
- databases
- event-driven architectures
- real-time systems
- collaborative editing
- WebSockets
- CRDTs
- monitoring
- alerting
- incident response
- performance debugging
- Node.js
- Python