Staff Software Engineer, Backend
- Compensation
- $241K–$284K / yr
- Location
- NYC
- Work setup
- Hybrid
- Seniority
- Staff
- Employment
- Not specified
- Experience
- 5+ years
- Category
- Backend
- Posted
Skills
Must have
- 7+ years of professional engineering experience with a strong backend focus, and a track record of owning system design and architectural choices for high-scale or high-growth products
- Already building with AI as a structural part of how you work, you've integrated LLMs into production systems, used AI tooling to accelerate your development workflow, and have a sharp point of view o
- Ship fast and course-correct, you're comfortable making architectural calls with incomplete information, iterating rapidly in production, and treating ambiguity as a feature of early-stage work, not a
- Deep Kotlin expertise with strong intuitions about backend architecture, service design, and performance at scale (TypeScript experience is a plus)
- Solid command of modern cloud infrastructure: AWS and Kubernetes, at the level of someone who can navigate it confidently without being a pure infra specialist
- Natural collaborator who can align PMs, designers, and engineering teams around a shared technical vision and keep execution moving without friction
- Exceptional communicator who can make complex architectural trade-offs legible to both engineers and non-technical stakeholders
Full description
About Genius AI
Genius AI is building technology to help local businesses run themselves. Genius AI products do the admin work that keeps practitioners from the work they love and the people they serve. From GlossGenius to Reception, its products work 24/7 on busywork like booking, marketing, client management, finances, staff and inventory management, and more.
Genius AI technology has saved businesses 106M in admin hours, earned them $2.0B in additional revenue, and facilitated more than 624M client touch points.
About the Role
Genius AI is building 0-to-1 AI products we expect to be a massive revenue driver, and this role sits at the center of that build. As a Staff Backend Engineer, you'll be the technical anchor for our highest-innovation teams: setting architectural direction, validating options through proof-of-concepts, and turning ambitious initiatives into clear, buildable roadmaps. This is an IC role with real leadership weight, roughly 60% architecture, planning, and technical direction, 40% hands-on building. The person in this role will be a force multiplier: unblocking engineers before they know they're stuck, making the hardest technical calls so the team doesn't lose momentum, and setting a new standard for what great backend engineering looks like at Genius AI. You won't be maintaining systems someone else designed, you'll be raising the ceiling on what this team can build, and doing it in a way that makes everyone around you better in the process.
You must be commutable to our NYC headquarters and will operate in a hybrid environment. We default to being in-office 3–4 days per week with required attendance on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
What You'll Do
- Architect and own the technical direction of AI-powered products and 0-to-1 builds, weighing long-term trade-offs with precision and keeping a healthy backlog of forward-looking, build-ready work
- Integrate AI models and LLMs into customer-facing products, not as experiments, but as production systems with real reliability and performance requirements
- Shape how Genius AI builds with AI, your architectural decisions will define what's possible across the product for years
- Write high-quality code and rapidly ship proof-of-concepts to validate architectural options and tackle the team's hardest technical challenges before they become blockers
- Partner with Product, Design, and Engineering leadership to translate ambiguous business goals into well-architected initiatives with clear sequencing and minimal rework
- Proactively identify and resolve systemic technical debt before it slows the team down, unblock engineers, raise the quality bar, and make the people around you disproportionately more effective