Senior Staff Software Development Engineer

Summary

Join Hike and become a Senior Staff - Software Development Engineer, leading, architecting, and scaling high-performance backend systems. This hands-on leadership role involves guiding top-tier engineers, shaping core backend infrastructure, and ensuring seamless performance at scale. You will design robust architectures, optimize mission-critical services, and drive engineering excellence. The ideal candidate excels in these areas and aligns with Hike's core values. This position offers the opportunity to contribute significantly to the Rush Gaming Universe. Learn more at work.hike.in.

Requirements

• 6+ years of relevant experience in building and scaling high-tech infrastructure
• Prior experience building from the ground up or significantly contributing to large-scale distributed systems/products
• Proven experience in designing and scaling complex backend architectures and distributed systems with high availability and fault tolerance
• Strong hands-on experience with designing microservices, RESTful APIs, event-driven architectures, and asynchronous processing
• Deep understanding of system design, algorithms, data structures, and performance tuning
• Strong coding skills in one or more of Java, Go, C++, or similar languages
• Practical experience with relational and NoSQL databases, caching layers (Redis, Memcached), and messaging systems (Kafka, RabbitMQ)
• Experience in setting up monitoring, logging, and alerting frameworks and tool for large-scale production systems
• Strong interpersonal skills with a proven ability to mentor, influence, and drive cross-team alignment

Responsibilities

• Provide architectural vision and technical direction for backend systems, ensuring scalability, reliability, and security
• Lead, mentor, and upskill a team of talented engineers, fostering a culture of high performance and continuous learning
• Drive design and code reviews to maintain high standards of engineering excellence
• Design and implement robust, high-performance backend services and APIs to support new and existing product features
• Define and drive system-level improvements, refactoring, and technical debt reduction to keep systems healthy and future-ready
• Contribute to long-term technical strategy, roadmap planning, and make build vs. buy decisions
• Own the end-to-end uptime, reliability, and performance of production services. Implement strong observability, incident management, and root cause analysis practices
• Optimize backend performance through load testing, profiling, and tuning to handle millions of users seamlessly
• Ensure the highest levels of security, compliance, and data privacy in all backend systems
• Partner with Product, Design, Data, and other engineering teams to deliver impactful products with speed and quality
• Advocate for and implement best practices, reusable frameworks, and tools to increase engineering efficiency across teams

Preferred Qualifications

A strong inclination toward experimentation and adaptability, especially around emerging AI technologies — whether through side projects, rapid prototyping, or applying them to real-world systems. Familiarity with tools like GitHub Copilot, ChatGPT, Cursor, Replit, CodeWhisperer, or AI-powered codegen and debugging assistants