Staff Software Engineer, Backend

<h1><strong>Staff Software Engineer, Backend</strong></h1><div style="min-height:1.2em;margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:0px"> </div><h2><strong>About Stream</strong></h2><p style="min-height:1.5em">Stream powers real-time<a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://getstream.io/chat/"> <u>Chat</u></a>,<a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://getstream.io/video/"> <u>Video</u></a>,<a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://getstream.io/activity-feeds/"> <u>Activity Feeds</u></a>, and<a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://getstream.io/moderation/"> <u>AI Moderation</u></a> for more than 1 billion end users across 4,000+ apps, from Strava and Bumble to eBay and Patreon. Our platform processes billions of API requests per month and supports applications with millions of concurrent users, while delivering highly reliable, low-latency services and a great developer experience.</p><p style="min-height:1.5em"></p><h2><strong>The role</strong></h2><p style="min-height:1.5em">We’re looking for <strong>Staff Software Engineers</strong>. You’ll join our <strong>Chat</strong> or <strong>Activity Feeds team</strong> and own backend systems that thousands of developers build their products on, from how they’re structured to how they scale.</p><p style="min-height:1.5em">This is a full-time role based in our Amsterdam (visa &amp; relocation support possible), Toronto, or Skopje office. We are also open to hiring the right person remote from the EU.</p><p style="min-height:1.5em"></p><h2><strong>About you</strong></h2><p style="min-height:1.5em">You’ve built backend systems at high scale and stayed long enough to live with your own decisions, good and bad. You care about how a system is structured, not only the next feature, and you can explain your trade-offs to the people who’ll live with them. Maybe you led a team for a few years and chose to go back to hands-on work. That’s welcome here: this is an individual contributor role, and you’ll write code and touch databases yourself. Our leads spend about 80% of their time hands-on too. You won’t enjoy it if you want to manage people, or if you’d rather stay away from infrastructure and database work.</p><p style="min-height:1.5em">We’re also hiring Senior Engineers on these teams. If your experience fits Senior better than Staff, we’ll say so openly and talk it through with you.</p><p style="min-height:1.5em"></p><h2><strong>You have</strong></h2><ul style="min-height:1.5em"><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Extensive backend engineering experience, including technical leadership on systems in production.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Proficiency in Go, Python, or in another backend language plus the willingness to switch to Go.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Experience building features used by a large number of users, and scaling them as usage grows.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Strong experience with a relational database. We use PostgreSQL, but any relational database counts.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Hands-on experience with Redis or a similar in-memory data store.</p></li><li><p style="min-