Staff Software Engineer, Backend

ABOUT THE ROLE You'll lead critical backend initiatives as Gamma scales from millions to hundreds of millions of users. This means architecting systems that never sleep, designing data models that support explosive growth, and solving the hardest scaling challenges we face. You'll have significant ownership over backend architecture and infrastructure, working across the stack to ensure Gamma stays fast and reliable at massive scale. As a Staff Engineer, you'll balance hands-on engineering with technical leadership. You'll ship to production daily, architect solutions to overcome bottlenecks, and mentor engineers while setting the standard for backend excellence. You'll work closely with engineering leadership, product, and infrastructure teams to build systems that handle our next order of magnitude of growth. Our team has a strong in-office culture and works in person 4–5 days per week in San Francisco. We love working together to stay creative and connected, with flexibility to work from home when focus matters most. WHAT YOU'LL DO - Build APIs that power our expanding platform and design data models that support our growing user base - Architect and lead scaling initiatives to handle our next order of magnitude of growth - Design and implement core infrastructure including Kafka pipelines, real-time AI streaming systems, and live subscription updates using event streaming - Lead performance optimization efforts and architect solutions to overcome bottlenecks - Mentor engineers while collaborating across teams to create exceptional developer and user experiences WHAT YOU'LL BRING - 8+ years of experience as a software engineer with deep expertise in building large-scale production systems, including highly available web APIs, large relational databases, and service-oriented architectures - Extensive experience with event streaming systems like Redis Pubsub or Apache Kafka, and a proven track record of leadership in large, complex production-scale codebases - Experience programming with TypeScript, Prisma, and Apollo GraphQL, with familiarity with Terraform and AWS services - Advanced experience with AI prompting and large language models - Passion for building APIs, scaling complex systems, and creating excellent web applications, with the ability to mentor and raise the bar for engineers around you - Computer science degree or related field (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. Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors, including but not limited to experience and expertise in the requirements listed above. If you're interested in this role but you don't meet every requirement, we encourage you to apply anyway! We're always excited about meeting great people.