Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Conversica is a remote-first company building AI-powered solutions that help businesses engage customers more effectively. They are seeking a Staff Backend Platform Engineer to set the technical direction for the production backend systems that power their next-generation AI platform, focusing on architecture and engineering standards. This role involves mentoring engineers, driving initiatives across teams, and making hands-on contributions to backend systems.
Responsibilities
- Set the technical direction for Conversica's backend platform, owning architecture decisions that span integrations, data, messaging, and orchestration across the entire system
- Drive cross-functional initiatives that touch multiple engineering teams, partnering with AI Engineering, Product, and Integrations leadership to shape platform strategy and roadmap
- Define and evolve org-wide engineering standards for backend service design, data modeling, integration patterns, observability, and operational excellence
- Identify systemic reliability, scalability, and performance risks across the platform and lead the engineering response
- Mentor senior and mid-level engineers across the backend organization, raising the technical bar through design reviews, written technical guidance, and pairing on hard problems
- Represent the backend platform in technical strategy discussions with executive leadership and contribute to multi-quarter roadmap planning
- Build and ship production code yourself; this is a hands-on individual contributor role, not a pure architect role
- Integration platform: inbound and outbound data processors, partner APIs, webhook ingestion, CSV bulk imports, sync logic, and resilient retry/backoff patterns for unreliable external systems
- Messaging infrastructure: email (AWS SES), SMS (Twilio), and chat (OpenAI Chatkit) delivery pipelines including throughput management, deliverability, suppression, and audit trails
- Platform services: the Campaign, Playbook, Flows, Contact, Knowledge, and Reporting services that compose our domain mode
- Data foundations: Postgres schema design, data models for contacts, conversations, campaigns, and configuration. Storage patterns optimized for both transactional workloads and agent retrieval
- Orchestration and event flows: FastAPI services, Celery workflows, EventBridge-driven event handling, queue management, and the action dispatch layer that executes agent decisions across CRM, calendar, and notification systems
Skills
- Equivalent of 8+ years of professional software engineering experience with significant focus on backend platform, integrations, or data infrastructure - including hands-on responsibility for systems running in production at scale
- Track record of leading cross-team or org-wide technical initiatives from conception through production, including the soft work of building consensus and unblocking other engineers
- Proven experience deploying and operating production backend systems at scale
- Strong proficiency in Python, including production experience with FastAPI, Celery, and similar async/queue-based frameworks
- Deep experience with Postgres including schema design, query optimization, and operating Postgres in production
- Experience working with large datasets and navigating real-world data quality challenges across heterogeneous source systems
- Experience setting engineering standards (service design, data architecture, operational practices) that other engineers adopted and built on
- Experience designing and operating integrations with third-party SaaS systems including handling rate limits, schema drift, and partial failures
- Strong background in modern cloud-based architectures, particularly AWS
- Active use of modern AI coding tools (Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, Cursor, or similar) as part of your development workflow
- Experience working in B2B SaaS environments
- Experience integrating with Marketing Automation Platforms (MAPs), Customer Relationship Management Systems (CRMs), Customer Data Platforms (CDPs), or Dealer Management Systems (DMS)
- Production experience with Terraform, EKS, Datadog, and GitLab
- Experience operating messaging infrastructure including SMTP, SMS aggregators, or chat platforms
- Experience building platforms that AI agents or other automated systems consume
- Experience with Redshift, DynamoDB, EventBridge, and Redis
Benefits
- Comprehensive health, dental, and vision benefits
- PTO
- Holiday pay
- 401(k)
- Equity
Company Overview
Conversica creates intelligent virtual assistants to serve as virtual team members. It was founded in 2007, and is headquartered in San Mateo, California, USA, with a workforce of 51-200 employees. Its website is http://www.conversica.com.Company H1B Sponsorship
Conversica has a track record of offering H1B sponsorships, with 4 in 2024, 2 in 2023, 3 in 2021, 1 in 2020. Please note that this does not guarantee sponsorship for this specific role.