Staff Engineer, Backend Developer

Job Overview

As a Staff Software Engineer, you will play a crucial role in building the next generation of Black Line’s data platform. You will design and build connectors to ERPs, banks, payments, tax, and subledger systems while ensuring extensibility, usability, scalability, and security of data transfer across a range of protocols. You will also work on cloud‑based backend components such as Event Bus, API Gateway, Developer Portal, Job Scheduler, Identity Management, Search, Workflow Orchestration, and Data Integration.

In addition to developing solutions, you will lead and mentor engineers, drive technical excellence, and contribute to product strategy and architecture.

• Provide technical expertise and leadership in requirements analysis, design, effort estimation, development, testing and delivery of highly scalable and secure distributed backend services.
• Work with product management, architects and other engineering teams to understand stated and unstated needs and turn them into functional and technical requirements.
• Maintain a strong sense of business value and return on investment in planning, design, and communication.
• Lead technical design and architecture discussions, drive technical decisions, and make trade‑offs on technology, functionality, robustness, performance and extensibility.
• Estimate the project scope and timelines, and consistently deliver on those commitments.
• Implement, refine, and enforce software development techniques to ensure delivered features meet integration, performance, security and maintainability expectations.
• Research, test, benchmark, and evaluate new tools and technologies, and recommend ways to integrate them into product development.
• Maintain high standards of software quality and technical excellence by establishing best practices and writing clean, testable, maintainable, and secure code.
• Act as an evangelist for a quality‑first culture, inspiring a forward‑thinking team of developers.
• Mentor and coach team members, guide solutions to complex design issues, and conduct peer code reviews.
• Proactively identify issues, bottlenecks, gaps or opportunities, and work to drive positive change or advocate for it.
• Perform critical maintenance, deployment and release support activities, including occasional off‑hours support.

• BS degree in Computer Science, or equivalent experience.
• 6+ years of professional experience building Web‑scale, highly available, multi‑tenant SaaS with a focus on backend platform, frameworks, RESTful APIs and microservices.
• Expertise in one or more object‑oriented programming languages – C#, Java or C++.
• Strong foundation in data structures, algorithms, and design patterns with a proven track record of writing high‑concurrency, multi‑threaded, secure, scalable code.
• Experience delivering extensible, modular applications using white‑box, glass‑box and black‑box extensibility models such as OO patterns, plugins, external callouts, and event notifications.
• Technical lead experience in design, architecture and code review for highly scalable distributed systems and event‑driven architecture.
• Fluency in SQL and No‑SQL, data modeling and transactional flows.
• Superior analytical, problem‑solving and system‑level performance analysis skills.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
• Collaborative team player focused on results and value delivery.
• Experience working in an Agile development environment.
• Passion for engineering excellence through automation, unit testing and process improvements.
• Experience with data integration and ETL tools (productized and open source).

• Experience with continuous delivery and infrastructure as code.
• Good knowledge of internet security issues in software design and code.
• Open source contributor.
• Proven experience delivering core platform services (API gateway, identity management, authentication, messaging such as Kafka or RabbitMQ, workflow orchestration, job scheduling and search).
• 3+ years of experience with a public cloud (AWS, Azure, or GCP) and solid understanding of cloud‑native services.
• Fin Tech or Financial services domain background.
• Experience with ERP (SAP,…