Senior Staff Software Engineer, Backend Platform

Patreon is a media and community platform where over 300,000 creators give their biggest fans access to exclusive work and experiences. We offer creators a variety of ways to engage with their fans and build a lasting business including: paid memberships, free memberships, community chats, live video, and selling to fans directly with one-time purchases. Ultimately our goal is simple: fund the creative class. And we're leaders in that space, with: - $10 billion+ generated by creators since Patreon's inception - 100 million+ free memberships for fans who may not be ready to pay just yet, and - 25 million+ paid memberships on Patreon today. We're continuing to invest heavily in building the best creator platform with the best team in the creator economy and are looking for a Senior Staff Backend Platform Engineer to support our mission. This role is based in San Francisco and open to those who are able to be in-office 2 days per week on a hybrid work model. ABOUT THE TEAM The Backend Platform team builds the foundational systems and infrastructure that power Patreon's creator platform. We're responsible for the core backend services, APIs, databases, infrastructure, and developer tooling that enable product teams across the company to ship quickly, reliably, and at scale. This team is growing and investing in foundational platform capabilities that will support Patreon's next phase of scale and product expansion. ABOUT THE ROLE - Define and drive the technical strategy for Patreon's backend platform and foundational infrastructure - Lead architecture and implementation of scalable distributed systems, APIs, event-driven systems, and platform services - Lead modernization efforts across backend architecture, service boundaries, data access patterns, and infrastructure - Establish technical standards and best practices around reliability, performance, scalability, and maintainability - Partner with product engineering teams to ensure platform capabilities align with business and product needs - Shape cross-functional technical decision-making at organizational scale - Help evolve operational maturity around incident management, resiliency, and production excellence - Mentor Staff and Senior engineers across the organization through design reviews, technical leadership, and hands-on collaboration WHAT YOU'LL NEED - Extensive experience building large-scale backend systems, with depth in distributed systems and platform architecture (typically 10+ years, or equivalent demonstrated expertise) - Deep expertise in distributed systems, high-throughput APIs, and low-latency architectures that support millions of DAUs - Experience with databases, caching systems, and storage technologies (e.g. MySQL, Postgres, Redis, DynamoDB) - Strong understanding of data modeling, storage systems, caching, queues, and event-driven architectures - Experience in performance optimization across APIs, databases, caching layers, and distributed services - Strong operational excellence mindset, including incident response and production debugging - Experience operating systems in cloud-native environments such as AWS and Kubernetes-based infrastructure - Proficiency in one or more backend languages such as Python, Go, Java, or Rust - Ability to communicate complex architectural trade-offs clearly in writing and in cross-functional forums - Experience mentoring Staff and Senior engineers and contributing to engineering culture through design reviews, documentation, or team standards We hire talented and passionate people from different backgrounds because workplace diversity and inclusion is critical to our ability to serve creators worldwide. If you’re excited about a role but your past experience doesn’t match with every bullet point outlined above, we strongly encourage you to apply anyway. If you’re a creator at heart, are energized by our mission, and share our company values, we’d love to hear from you. About Patreon Patreon powers creators to do what t