Staff Software Engineer, Backend

About GlossGenius GlossGenius is the AI-powered system behind the world’s most meaningful appointments, helping 100,000+ service businesses earn more revenue and free up time for the work they love. Our agentic workforce gets more clients in the door, grows profit per appointment, and keeps clients coming back — doing the jobs owners never had time for and couldn’t justify hiring to fill. Businesses on GlossGenius process billions in annual payment volume, and see 65% more revenue using GlossGenius Payments by growing ticket size, rebooking clients at checkout, and saving on processing fees. About the Role GlossGenius is building 0-to-1 AI products we expect to be a massive revenue driver, and this role sits at the center of that build. As a Staff Backend Engineer, you'll be the technical anchor for our highest-innovation teams: setting architectural direction, validating options through proof-of-concepts, and turning ambitious initiatives into clear, buildable roadmaps. This is an IC role with real leadership weight, roughly 60% architecture, planning, and technical direction, 40% hands-on building. The person in this role will be a force multiplier: unblocking engineers before they know they're stuck, making the hardest technical calls so the team doesn't lose momentum, and setting a new standard for what great backend engineering looks like at GlossGenius. You won't be maintaining systems someone else designed, you'll be raising the ceiling on what this team can build, and doing it in a way that makes everyone around you better in the process. You must be commutable to our NYC headquarters and will operate in a hybrid environment. We default to being in-office 3–4 days per week with required attendance on Tuesdays and Thursdays. What You'll Do Architect and own the technical direction of AI-powered products and 0-to-1 builds, weighing long-term trade-offs with precision and keeping a healthy backlog of forward-looking, build-ready work Integrate AI models and LLMs into customer-facing products, not as experiments, but as production systems with real reliability and performance requirements Shape how GlossGenius builds with AI, your architectural decisions will define what's possible across the product for years Write high-quality code and rapidly ship proof-of-concepts to validate architectural options and tackle the team's hardest technical challenges before they become blockers Partner with Product, Design, and Engineering leadership to translate ambiguous business goals into well-architected initiatives with clear sequencing and minimal rework Proactively identify and resolve systemic technical debt before it slows the team down, unblock engineers, raise the quality bar, and make the people around you disproportionately more effective What We're Looking For 7+ years of professional engineering experience with a strong backend focus, and a track record of owning system design and architectural choices for high-scale or high-growth products Already building with AI as a structural part of how you work, you've integrated LLMs into production systems, used AI tooling to accelerate your development workflow, and have a sharp point of view on where AI changes what's architecturally possible Ship fast and course-correct, you're comfortable making architectural calls with incomplete information, iterating rapidly in production, and treating ambiguity as a feature of early-stage work, not a reason to slow down Deep Kotlin expertise with strong intuitions about backend architecture, service design, and performance at scale (TypeScript experience is a plus) Solid command of modern cloud infrastructure: AWS and Kubernetes, at the level of someone who can navigate it confidently without being a pure infra specialist Natural collaborator who can align PMs, designers, and engineering teams around a shared technical vision and keep execution moving without friction Exceptional communicator who can make complex architectural trade-offs l