Staff Engineer - Cross Border

Job description

**This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, which manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Staff Engineer – Cross Border based in India.** As a Staff Engineer – Cross Border, you will shape the technical direction of a global e-commerce platform connecting international buyers with sellers in Japan. You will lead the architecture and development of scalable backend systems that support a seamless shopping experience across multiple countries, currencies, and regulatory environments. Working across engineering teams in India and Japan, you will drive cross-functional technical decisions, establish reliable service boundaries, and simplify complex distributed systems. This hands-on leadership role combines strategic system design with practical implementation, production reliability, and engineering mentorship. You will also help establish an AI-native engineering culture by integrating coding agents and AI-assisted development practices into everyday workflows. Your work will directly influence platform scalability, engineering productivity, and the successful expansion of a global marketplace into new regions ### Accountabilities - **Define technical direction:** Shape the architecture of cross-border backend systems supporting international customers purchasing from Japanese marketplace sellers. - **Lead cross-team system design:** Coordinate architecture across the entire purchasing journey, including discovery and search, product details, pricing, landed costs, checkout, payments, and post-purchase experiences. - **Establish clear service boundaries:** Define robust API contracts and Backend-for-Frontend (BFF) patterns that support iOS, Android, and web applications. - **Build scalable backend services:** Design, develop, test, and maintain reliable Go services while remaining hands-on with complex technical challenges and critical implementation work. - **Enable global platform scalability:** Develop systems that support multiple regions through a consistent global platform, avoiding unnecessary country-specific fragmentation. - **Own production reliability:** Establish standards for observability, safe deployments, incident response, and continuous operational improvement across marketplace services, partner integrations, payment systems, and third-party providers. - **Accelerate engineering delivery:** Help two to four engineering teams overcome complex design challenges, simplify platform architecture, and improve delivery speed and quality. - **Advance AI-assisted engineering:** Integrate coding agents, AI-assisted code reviews, automated testing, debugging, and operational automation into the software development lifecycle. - **Drive cross-functional alignment:** Collaborate with product managers and engineers across India and Japan to turn ambiguous business and technical challenges into actionable engineering plans. - **Mentor technical leaders:** Coach senior engineers, strengthen architectural decision-making, and help engineering teams use AI agents effectively while maintaining high standards of software quality and reliability. ## Requirements - **Professional experience:** 10–12 years of software engineering experience, including demonstrated leadership of complex backend initiatives spanning multiple teams. - **Backend engineering expertise:** Strong experience with Go or the ability to become productive in Go quickly, including API design, implementation, and testing. - **Distributed systems:** Deep knowledge of designing, building, and operating distributed systems in cloud-native environments, particularly Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Kubernetes. - **System architecture:** Excellent system design, data modeling, production debugging, and architectural decision-making skills. - **Production reliability:** Experience operating customer-facing systems at approximately 99.95% availability, with a strong understanding of observability, incident management, and reliability engineering. - **Customer-facing product delivery:** A proven record of delivering large-scale, customer-visible product capabilities rather than focusing exclusively on internal services. - **Technical leadership:** Ability to influence architecture and engineering standards across multiple teams without relying on formal authority. - **AI-enabled development:** Practical experience applying AI or large language models (LLMs) to improve engineering productivity through coding agents, AI-assisted reviews, testing, debugging, or similar workflows. - **Communication and collaboration:** Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to explain architectural decisions, technical trade-offs, and risks to technical and non-technical stakeholders. - **Cross-border commerce knowledge:** Experience with international e-commerce, payments, multi-currency transactions, or multi-region systems is an advantage. - **Search and data platforms:** Familiarity with search, personalization, Elasticsearch, event streams, or machine learning pipelines is desirable. - **Client and API architecture:** Experience with BFF patterns and familiarity with React or mobile application clients is beneficial. - **External integrations:** Experience integrating third-party partners and external APIs at scale is an advantage. - **Platform engineering:** A track record of simplifying technology stacks, improving shared platforms, or driving platformization initiatives is valuable. - **AI tooling development:** Experience developing AI agents or AI-powered developer tools is a plus. - **Learning mindset:** Willingness to learn the Japanese marketplace domain, internal platforms, and cross-border requirements involving duties, taxes, logistics, and regional regulations. - **Leadership approach:** A collaborative, proactive mindset that balances bold architectural thinking with practical execution, shared ownership, and a commitment to engineering excellence. ## Benefits - **Employment type:** Full-time position. - **Work arrangement:** Hybrid working model based in Bengaluru, India. - **Weekly flexibility:** The stated working arrangement includes two days per week in the office and three days working remotely. - **In-person collaboration:** Team members are encouraged to work from the Bengaluru office, particularly during the initial office setup phase, to strengthen collaboration and organizational development. - **Professional impact:** Opportunity to influence the architecture of a global e-commerce platform and contribute to expansion into additional international markets. - **Technical ownership:** A hands-on staff-level engineering role with significant influence over system design, platform reliability, and cross-team engineering standards. - **AI-driven innovation:** Opportunity to help define how engineers and autonomous AI agents collaborate across software design, development, testing, deployment, and operations. - **Mentorship and leadership:** Scope to develop senior engineers and strengthen technical leadership across distributed engineering teams in India and Japan. - **Salary and additional benefits:** Compensation, healthcare coverage, bonuses, equity, paid leave, and other benefits are not specified in the available job description and should be confirmed during the hiring process.