Staff Backend Engineer - Trust & Control Safety Systems

Job description

**This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Staff Backend Engineer - Trust & Control Safety Systems based in India.** This is a high-impact Staff Engineering role focused on building the systems that protect a large-scale platform from fraud, abuse, accidental overuse, and financial risk. You will architect and shape a real-time Trust, Controls & Safety platform supporting critical workflows such as signups, SaaS checkout, user management, billing, and global communications. The role combines distributed systems, data architecture, real-time processing, observability, and policy-driven enforcement. You will work on highly available, low-latency infrastructure processing hundreds of millions of events and significant transaction volumes every day. As a technical leader, you will own complex architectural challenges while remaining deeply hands-on with design, coding, debugging, and production operations. You will influence engineering direction across multiple teams and collaborate with Product, Engineering, Finance, Risk, Support, and other business stakeholders. The role offers the opportunity to shape foundational safety systems while mentoring engineers and establishing engineering practices that scale with a rapidly growing platform. ### Accountabilities - Architect, redesign, and optimize backend data models, queries, indexes, and storage strategies across MongoDB, Firestore, Elasticsearch, and related technologies. - Own Elasticsearch reliability and scalability, including ingestion, indexing, shard strategies, query performance, and lifecycle management across billions of documents. - Design highly available, low-latency distributed systems that balance strong enforcement with a seamless customer experience. - Define clear data flows and integration boundaries across databases, caches, APIs, and other platform components, incorporating fault isolation and well-defined contracts. - Improve system reliability and performance by eliminating bottlenecks, strengthening replication health, and maintaining predictable query and indexing latency. - Build comprehensive observability across critical data paths through metrics, tracing, slow-query analysis, replication monitoring, and cluster health dashboards. - Establish and enforce strong testing standards, including unit, integration, and load testing across backend services and modules. - Design and evolve policy- and rules-driven systems that support configurable behavior, versioning, controlled rollouts, and safe rollback without requiring frequent deployments. - Apply sound technical judgment when defining thresholds and enforcement actions, ensuring that genuine abuse is addressed without unnecessarily impacting legitimate customers. - Conduct hands-on engineering work, including writing production code, designing systems, troubleshooting complex issues, and resolving production incidents. - Drive technical decision-making through RFCs, architecture decision records, design reviews, and reusable engineering patterns. - Mentor engineers across teams through technical reviews, thoughtful feedback, knowledge sharing, and hands-on guidance. - Lead cross-functional architectural initiatives through influence, creating alignment and driving complex technical decisions from design through production. - Research evolving fraud, abuse, security, and technology challenges and translate findings into scalable technical solutions. - Collaborate closely with Engineering Managers, Product Managers, Finance, Risk, Support, and other stakeholders to ensure platform controls align with business and customer needs. ## Requirements - 8+ years of experience building high-scale, mission-critical backend systems where reliability and p99 latency are critical. - Deep expertise in distributed systems, concurrency, event-driven architectures, consistency mechanisms, idempotency, atomic operations, and related system-design principles. - Proven experience developing systems where correctness has direct financial consequences, such as metering, billing, ledgers, payment gateways, reservations, or transactional platforms. - Strong experience with both relational and NoSQL data models, particularly for complex transactional workloads, along with familiarity with streaming and analytical data stores. - Experience designing configurable policy or rules engines with versioning, safe deployment, controlled rollout, and rollback capabilities. - Strong understanding of production reliability, monitoring, SLOs, performance optimization, troubleshooting, and root-cause analysis. - Demonstrated ability to provide technical leadership without formal authority and drive architecture across multiple teams. - Hands-on experience with technologies such as MongoDB, Firestore, Elasticsearch, Redis, Go, Node.js, or comparable backend and data technologies. - Experience with high-throughput or latency-sensitive production services and real-time data processing is highly valuable. - Familiarity with streaming platforms and technologies such as Flink, Kafka Streams, or Beam, and analytical platforms such as ClickHouse or BigQuery. - Experience with abuse prevention, fraud detection, velocity controls, adversarial defense systems, or other trust and safety technologies is strongly preferred. - Familiarity with hallucination mitigation approaches for AI-enabled systems, including code constraints, testing frameworks, embeddings, and context injection. - Strong analytical and problem-solving abilities, with sound judgment when balancing technical risk, customer impact, and business requirements. - Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to explain complex technical concepts to engineering and non-technical stakeholders. - A pragmatic, hands-on approach, combining long-term architectural thinking with iterative delivery and measurable outcomes. - A Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical discipline is beneficial but equivalent professional experience may be considered. - Contributions to open-source projects, internal engineering platforms, or technical publications are a plus. ## Benefits - Fully remote work environment within India. - Opportunity to work on mission-critical backend infrastructure operating at significant scale. - High degree of technical ownership and influence over architecture and engineering standards. - Collaboration with multidisciplinary teams across Engineering, Product, Finance, Risk, and Support. - Strong opportunities to mentor engineers and shape technical culture across multiple teams. - Exposure to distributed systems, real-time processing, trust and safety, fraud prevention, billing, and AI-enabled technologies. - Opportunity to solve complex technical challenges involving high availability, low latency, financial correctness, and platform integrity. - Inclusive, remote-first environment focused on ownership, innovation, collaboration, and professional growth. - Opportunities to contribute to internal platforms, open-source initiatives, and technical knowledge sharing. - Equal opportunity workplace committed to fair and inclusive employment practices.