Backend Engineer - Developer Foundations Job Washington area,District of Columbia USA,Software Development

Position: Staff Backend Engineer - Developer Foundations

Meet Fetch Platform Engineering

Platform engineering at Fetch is grounded in service to developers, strong ownership, and purposeful innovation. Rather than building end-user features, platform engineers focus on the foundations that other teams rely on, spanning core systems, architecture, automation, and developer workflows.

This work lives in complex problem spaces where the right answer is rarely obvious. Our engineers navigate ambiguity with data and sound judgment, understand tradeoffs, and partner closely across product and engineering to solve problems that scale. We maintain a high technical bar and value practicality, curiosity, and continuous improvement.

This is an environment for builders who enjoy shaping durable platforms, improving developer experience at scale, and enabling teams across Fetch to ship with confidence.

About the Role:

Fetch is building the most rewarding way to shop, and how fast and reliably our engineers ship is a big part of how we get there. We invest heavily in the tools, standards, and infrastructure that help engineers deliver reliable software faster across backend, mobile, ML, and web, including modernizing our developer workflows with AI-assisted development.

We're hiring a Staff Backend Engineer to design and build the systems behind that developer experience. You'll own architecture across developer tooling, test infrastructure, and engineering workflows, and you'll be hands-on building the SDKs, reusable components, and shared platforms that raise engineering velocity and quality across the company. This is a senior technical role focused on system design and execution, not people management, but it carries broad influence: you'll set architectural direction, define standards, and mentor engineers across multiple teams.

This is a high-impact role at the intersection of developer platforms, engineering infrastructure, and operational excellence, where scalability, reliability, and quality are non-negotiable. This is a full-time role that can be held from one of our US offices or remotely in the United States.

What you’ll do at Fetch (Role Responsibilities):

Design and build the tools, golden paths, SDKs, and evaluation frameworks that improve how engineers deliver high-quality software, including AI-assisted development workflows.
Architect core building blocks such as cross-platform contract testing, integration test infrastructure, and unified components that make development reliable across backend, mobile, and data.
Build observability and governance for developer tooling, including telemetry and metrics that give visibility into developer productivity, code quality, and platform health.
Design and evolve internal libraries and marketplaces of reusable templates and components, with quality gates, versioning, and lifecycle governance that sustain adoption at scale.
Evaluate and integrate emerging developer tools, including AI-assisted development tools, and turn the promising ones into production-grade platform capabilities.
Lead architectural decisions across multiple services and domains, balancing reliability, developer velocity, maintainability, and operational cost as the platform grows.
Improve engineering leverage by identifying opportunities for platformization, reusable services, and shared infrastructure that accelerate development across multiple teams.
Partner across Engineering, Product, and Data to define platform capabilities, evaluate technical tradeoffs, and align technical investments with measurable adoption and quality outcomes.
Raise the bar on engineering standards, systems-level thinking, and operational excellence, helping teams shift from feature-delivery to system-creation.
Influence org-level technical priorities and investment, partnering with engineering and product leadership to sequence multi-quarter platform bets and set technical direction across the org, not just execute a roadmap.
Mentor senior engineers and set standards for design, reliability, and maintainability, driving influence well beyond your direct areas of ownership.

In your Toolbox (Minimum Requirements):

12+ years designing, building, and operating backend or platform systems at scale, with a strong programming background in Go, Python, or similar (Kotlin/Swift a plus).
Deep experience owning architecture for complex distributed systems (scalability, failure modes, operational maturity) and making high-impact architectural and investment tradeoffs that set technical direction for a broad…