# Staff Software Engineer, Backend at Customer.io > Remote · Americas · Staff · Backend · open. Source: https://alderhq.app/jobs/greenhouse%3Acustomerio%3A8191498 (read 2026-11-05). ## Facts (observed) - Company: [Customer.io](https://alderhq.app/companies/customer-io) - Location text: Americas Remote; Americas Remote - Where it can be done from (inferred): Remote · Americas (evidence: "Remote role open worldwide") - Posted: 2026-09-17 (48 days ago) - First seen by alder: 2026-11-02 · last verified: 2026-11-04 - Reposted: 0 times · edited: 0 times - Apply on the employer's site: https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/customerio/jobs/8191498 - Skills listed (inferred): React, Go, MySQL, AWS, GCP, Distributed systems ## Pay and sponsorship - Posted pay: $200k–$240k per year (from the description) ## Description (the employer's text) Hi, I'm Paul, VP of Engineering at Customer.io. We're looking for a staff engineer to set technical direction for the systems that move billions of messages a day. This isn't a role about shipping more, faster. It's about deciding what gets built, where the architecture needs to go next, and raising the ceiling for the engineers around you. ### About Customer.io Over 9,000 companies — from scrappy startups to global brands — use our platform to send billions of emails, push notifications, in-app messages, and SMS every day. Customer.io powers automated communication that people actually want to receive. We help teams send smarter, more relevant messages using real-time behavioral data. Under the hood: Go, React, Ember and AI help us ship fast and scale with confidence. ### What We Value ### Ownership at company scale You take on the problems nobody has claimed yet — the ones that span squads, have no obvious owner, and would quietly cost us a year if left alone. You either solve them or get leadership aligned to. ### Engineers with product taste You think like a user, not just an engineer. You connect architectural decisions to what customers actually experience, and you can explain that connection to people who don't write Go. ### A healthy skepticism for "the way things are done" You retire practices that have outlived their usefulness, including ones you helped build. Best practices matter — but never more than forward motion. ### Force multiplication Your best quarter isn't measured by what you shipped. It's measured by what the department can now do that it couldn't before. ### What You'll Do - Shape the technical direction of our distributed messaging systems in Go — making the high-level architectural calls on mission-critical services where scale, cost, and reliability are all in tension - Take on ambiguous, high-stakes problems that cross squad and function boundaries, and drive them to a decision when the right answer isn't obvious to anyone yet - Build consensus on contested technical questions across teams, and communicate the tradeoffs clearly enough that senior leadership can act on them - Raise the department's bar — set quality and design standards, mentor senior engineers, and turn what you know into frameworks and documentation other teams can use without you in the room - Drive engineering process and tooling improvements that span multiple squads, not just your own - Participate in an on-call rotation as required, supporting the reliability of the systems you build - Interview and calibrate against our career ladder, giving honest, evidence-based assessments of candidates - Use AI agents to make multi-file changes by scoping the work, writing the prompt, and verifying the output ### What we're looking for - 10+ years building scalable, distributed systems in Go (or similar statically typed languages), including several as the person others turned to on architecture - Depth across multiple systems or domains, not just one — you've been the recognized expert in more than one place - A track record of designing for production reality: you quantify tradeoffs in throughput, cost, and reliability rather than picking a reasonable path and defending it - Experience designing observability and recovery as first-class concerns — metrics, alerting, rollback, backpressure, checkpointing — not logging added afterward - Comfort working in cloud-native environments (AWS, GCP), with relational databases (we use MySQL) and a real understanding of performance tradeoffs - Evidence of making other engineers better: mentorship, technical writing, design review, standards that outlasted your involvement - A bias for action over perfection, and the judgment to know which decisions are worth slowing down for ### Compensation & Benefits We believe in transparency. Starting salary for this role is $200,000 - $240,000 USD (or equivalent in local currency) depending on experience and subject to market rate adjustment. This role also carries a 10% annual bonus target. In addition to base salary, this role includes an equity grant in the form of stock options, so you share in the success you help build. --- Data: alder (https://alderhq.app). Cite https://alderhq.app/jobs/greenhouse%3Acustomerio%3A8191498 and the date you read it. Observed facts come from the employer's own listing; location reach, level, family and skills are inferences.