Staff Backend Engineer
NxT Level · San Francisco, CA
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Jul 12, 2026
San Francisco, CA
Jul 21, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
A staff-level backend engineering role at a consumer collectibles marketplace, focused on scaling infrastructure to handle billions of monthly transactions. Core work involves designing and expanding container-based (EKS) systems, breaking apart monolithic codebases into microservices, launching backend support for new product categories, and improving production reliability through observability tooling. Suits a senior engineer with strong architectural instincts and experience in high-volume, consumer-facing platforms.
Staff level · 8+ years · San Francisco-Oakland-Berkeley, CA · Full-time
“or” means any one of them counts — you don't need all of them.
Posted 2 times — it's one opening, so apply once.
We read this from the posting text with AI. Skim the description below before ruling yourself out.
How this req sits in the market our data
Roughly 1,250 people in the San Francisco-Oakland-Berkeley, CA area plausibly meet what this posting asks for (software developers). range 930–1,600
Applicant volume Moderate — A normal amount of company. The rare requirements below are what will separate a shortlisted application from the rest.
What the occupation pays Median $190,744 (middle half $167,095–$224,501).
Estimated from BLS employment for this occupation and area, per-skill prevalence across our listing corpus, and published wage benchmarks — as of Jul 28, 2026. It is a model, not a headcount.
Why we read it this way (5)
This role is classified as Staff rather than Senior because the JD explicitly titles it 'Staff Backend Engineer', describes genuine org-wide technical influence (owning architecture across platform scale, reliability, and new vertical launches), and frames the candidate as a 'highly opinionated technical architect' owning large projects end-to-end — scope that goes beyond a single-team Senior engineer.
EKS is listed as the primary container platform with Kubernetes as the stated alternative ('EKS or Kubernetes-based environments'); both are captured under one skill.
Datadog and Sentry appear together in the requirements section as interchangeable observability platforms ('tools like Datadog, Sentry, or similar'); captured as one skill with Sentry as the alternative.
Claude Code and Cursor are named AI-powered development tools mentioned in the 'What You'll Do' narrative and framed as comfort/workflow items rather than hard gates in the requirements block — treated as preferred.
No compensation range is stated in the posting.
Read the full posting
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