Staff Software Engineer (Backend)

About the role

About the Role:

We are looking for a Staff Software Engineer who combines deep technical expertise with strong organizational influence. This role operates beyond individual service ownership and requires demonstrated impact across teams, domains, and large-scale distributed systems.

This is a hybrid role based out of our SF office.

What You'll Do:

- Define and drive architectural direction across multiple services and teams

- Lead the design and evolution of distributed systems

- Ensure systems are built for long-term scalability, resilience, observability, and security

- Drive cross-team technical alignment across client, infrastructure, product, ads, and content organizations

- Mentor senior engineers and elevate engineering standards across the team

- Own critical system design decisions that impact multiple platforms

- Contribute to domain leadership in areas such as Linear systems, EPG platforms, or time-based content architectures (preferred)

- Shape and evolve Tubi’s backend development practices, including AI-native engineering workflows

- Flexibility to support business-critical needs outside regular working hours when necessary, like oncall and live events.

- Strong sense of ownership, with proactive attention to on-call situations and production stability.

- Demonstrated cross-team leadership, with familiarity working across multiple teams in complex organizational environments.

Your Background:

- Extensive experience designing and operating large-scale distributed systems

- Deep expertise in backend development (Elixir and Rust preferred, or strong background in comparable languages)

- Strong architectural judgment with proven cross-team technical leadership

- Strong experience with gRPC/Protocol Buffers, RESTful APIs, Kubernetes, and observability systems

- Demonstrated ability to lead complex, cross-functional initiatives

- Strong communication skills with the ability to articulate trade-offs and drive alignment

- Experience working in high-traffic, mission-critical production environments

- Familiarity with Linear content systems, EPG platforms, or other time-based scheduling architectures is preferred

- Hands-on experience building or supporting systems for large-scale live events (e.g., major sports tournaments) with high concurrency and real-time demands.

Bonus/Preferred:

- Deep production experience in Elixir & Rust

- Deep production experience with Pingora or Nginx

- Advanced Kubernetes experience

- Prior ownership of large-scale architectural transformations

The AI Mandate: AI-Driven Development Practice

This role goes beyond traditional engineering. As a Staff Engineer, you will help define how AI is integrated into backend development at Tubi. The goal is to unlock smarter execution, faster delivery, and automation at scale, while ensuring responsible and secure use of these technologies.