Staff Backend Engineer

Summary

Join Tango as a Staff Backend Engineer and build a workflow intelligence platform to significantly enhance team productivity. You will be a key member of a skilled and diverse team, utilizing a modern tech stack with a serverless cloud architecture. This remote position, based in the US, offers the opportunity to influence the product roadmap and collaborate directly with founders and senior team members. You will lead the design and execution of large-scale system architectures, drive technical strategy, and mentor other engineers. The role involves managing the full code lifecycle and championing performance and testing. Tango offers a competitive compensation package, including a base salary ranging from $175,000 to $230,000, equity, and comprehensive benefits.

Requirements

• You have 10+ years of professional experience in relevant software engineering roles, with a significant focus on backend development and database management
• You are an excellent communicator and take a collaborative approach to problem solving
• You are passionate about leading and growing a team of senior engineers
• You are obsessive about quality and performance measurement. You know what parts of your code require tests (and write those tests)
• You are an expert in managing technical debt; if you choose not to avoid it, you encapsulate it
• You have product sense: you create more than just beautiful code and can play a crucial role in choosing what we build and how we build it
• Above all else, you are a continuous learner and are excited to add new skills to your toolbox. We believe that the best engineers can learn new skills on the job

Responsibilities

• Lead the end-to-end design and execution of large-scale system architectures, ensuring the successful rollout of complex and innovative features
• Drive technical strategy and architecture decisions with our CTO and other engineering leaders, focusing on scalability and reliability
• Architect and implement scalable backend systems to 10x the growth of Tango's platform
• Elevate the engineering team through close mentorship, implementing best practices, and coaching new hires
• Distill complex initiatives into executable milestones. Forecast unknowns, define success metrics, and drive cross-team delivery for ambiguous, multi-quarter projects
• Lead our cloud, infrastructure, and DevOps initiatives to maintain a smooth user and developer experience by creating clear proposals that align engineering, product, and design on architectural changes and new capabilities
• Manage the full lifecycle of your code, from development to production, ensuring it supports high-scale use cases
• Champion performance profiling, automated testing and observability

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with AWS services common to serverless architectures ( AWS Lambda, AppSync, API Gateway, DynamoDB, IAM, etc. )
• Experience building GraphQL backends or comparable API development experience
• Experience with authentication patterns using services such as AWS Cognito , Auth0 or Okta
• Experience with TypeScript, Node.js and testing frameworks like Jest, Vitest, Cypress, or Playwright
• Track record optimizing relevance in search & recommendation systems
• Experience operationalizing LLM or vector-search based features in production
• Expertise building Chrome extensions or rich DOM integrations
• Experience with Infrastructure as Code: AWS CDK or Serverless Framework
• Familiarity with modern frontend frameworks (React, Vue, Svelte, etc.), enabling occasional full-stack contributions

Benefits

• Full Medical/Dental/Vision coverage with 100% employer contribution, FSA, and an HSA for qualified plans
• 4 free therapy sessions annually through Spring Health
• Competitive compensation and annual equity refresh program
• 401(k) plan
• Work from anywhere in the US, with UberEats and Deskpass stipends—on us!
• Generous annual stipend for Learning & Development
• Health and Wellness stipend
• Unlimited PTO, 10 holidays, 4 personal volunteer days, 4 mental health days, and birthdays off
• Paid parental leave
• Subsidized National Parks Annual Pass
• Subsidized Roller Skates (yes, seriously)