HackerRank
About this role
HackerRank's platform is used by around 2,500 companies to assess developers, and this Staff role owns the core platforms underneath it. The posting describes designing and evolving the API, data and AI platforms so they stay scalable, observable, secure and cost aware, and it gives a concrete sense of the load: thousands of concurrent assistant sessions and bursty traffic. AI is treated as a first class architectural concern rather than a feature, covering request orchestration, evaluation harnesses, guardrails and safety, and prompt and data governance. The rest of the role is the part that makes it Staff rather than senior: aligning the engineering roadmap with business outcomes, translating company goals and customer needs into a technical roadmap, and communicating tradeoffs in plain language to people who are not engineers. Mentoring through code reviews, design reviews and hands on pairing is explicitly part of the job, as is partnering with product managers and sometimes customer facing teams.
Who this is for
What the posting requires
- Over 8 years building and operating production grade services with clear ownership of outcomes
- Strong system design and distributed systems, hands on across AWS or GCP, containers and Kubernetes, infrastructure as code with Terraform, and CI/CD automation
- Depth in one or more of Go, Java, Ruby, Python or JavaScript, plus the ability to pick up new languages and frameworks quickly
- Proficiency with PostgreSQL or MySQL and NoSQL databases, and experience with event driven architectures using Kafka or similar for streaming and async work
- Excellent communication: writing clear documentation, explaining tradeoffs simply, mentoring peers and influencing across teams without direct authority
Counts as a bonus, not a requirement
- Exposure to AI systems in production such as language model gateways, prompt or model evaluation, and guardrails
- Experience improving developer experience across a company
- Public artefacts such as design write ups, talks or open source contributions
What you would actually be doing
- Aligning the engineering roadmap with business outcomes, and communicating the tradeoffs in plain language
- Designing and evolving core API, data and AI platforms that stay scalable, observable, secure and cost aware under thousands of concurrent sessions and bursty traffic
- Embedding AI as a first class concern: request orchestration, evaluation harnesses, guardrails and safety, and prompt and data governance
- Partnering with product managers and customer facing teams to drive impact
- Mentoring through reviews, design reviews and hands on pairing
Location and working pattern
Hybrid in Bangalore.
A good fit if
You have most of a decade of backend experience and want platform ownership at a product engineers choose to use, and you are as comfortable writing a design document as writing code. The posting says outright that it values balancing long term decisions with fast incremental delivery, and caring about developer experience as much as raw performance.
Think twice if
You want a pure coding role. A large share of this one is judgement, communication, roadmap and influence, and the posting weights communication unusually heavily for an engineering listing.
- Over 8 years building and operating production grade services with clear ownership of outcomes
- Strong system design and distributed systems, hands on across AWS or GCP, containers and Kubernetes, infrastructure as code with Terraform, and CI/CD automation
- Depth in one or more of Go, Java, Ruby, Python or JavaScript, plus the ability to pick up new languages and frameworks quickly
- Proficiency with PostgreSQL or MySQL and NoSQL databases, and experience with event driven architectures using Kafka or similar for streaming and async work
- Excellent communication: writing clear documentation, explaining tradeoffs simply, mentoring peers and influencing across teams without direct authority
Counts as a bonus, not a requirement
- Exposure to AI systems in production such as language model gateways, prompt or model evaluation, and guardrails
- Experience improving developer experience across a company
- Public artefacts such as design write ups, talks or open source contributions
What you would actually be doing
- Aligning the engineering roadmap with business outcomes, and communicating the tradeoffs in plain language
- Designing and evolving core API, data and AI platforms that stay scalable, observable, secure and cost aware under thousands of concurrent sessions and bursty traffic
- Embedding AI as a first class concern: request orchestration, evaluation harnesses, guardrails and safety, and prompt and data governance
- Partnering with product managers and customer facing teams to drive impact
- Mentoring through reviews, design reviews and hands on pairing
Location and working pattern
Hybrid in Bangalore.
A good fit if
You have most of a decade of backend experience and want platform ownership at a product engineers choose to use, and you are as comfortable writing a design document as writing code. The posting says outright that it values balancing long term decisions with fast incremental delivery, and caring about developer experience as much as raw performance.
Think twice if
You want a pure coding role. A large share of this one is judgement, communication, roadmap and influence, and the posting weights communication unusually heavily for an engineering listing.
Apply on company site
Opens job-boards.greenhouse.io, the employer's own application page. Applying is always free.