As a Staff Backend Engineer at Zeals, you won’t just write code — you will own systems end-to-end, shape our architectural strategy, and influence technical direction across teams. You will be a key technical leader in our backend domain, responsible for designing scalable, fault-tolerant systems that power mission-critical services and accelerate the impact of our conversational commerce platform. This role is not about following roadmaps — it’s about creating them. You’ll work across teams to raise the engineering bar, mentor senior engineers, and drive strategic decisions that shape our product and infrastructure for years to come.
Our Tech Stack
- Backend Languages: Go, Python, Elixir
- Frontend Languages: HTML, CSS, JavaScript (TypeScript, React.js, Recoil, Zod, Tanstack, etc)
- Mobile Languages: None
- Infrastructure: Google Cloud Platform, GCP Pub/Sub, Kubernetes, MongoDB, MySQL, Postgres, BigQuery, Elasticsearch, Qdrant
- Configuration management tool: Terraform
- CI/CD: Github Actions, ArgoCD, CircleCI
- Monitoring: Grafana, GCP Cloud Monitoring, GCP Logging, GCP Cloud Trace, Opsgenie
- Data: BigQuery, Parquet, Spark, Scala, Python, dbt
- Knowledge Tools: Confluence
- Other: GitHub / Slack / Jira
- Process: Scrum
Responsibilities
- Drive architecture and design of complex, distributed backend systems with a focus on scalability, reliability, and performance
- Lead initiatives to modernize legacy systems and migrate to robust, decoupled services using Golang, gRPC, and REST
- Own high-stakes technical decisions, balancing trade-offs and setting standards for software design across teams
- Ensure best practices in clean code, DDD, testing, observability, and documentation are deeply embedded in the development lifecycle
- Collaborate with engineering leadership, product managers, and stakeholders to align backend capabilities with business priorities
- Foster a culture of technical excellence through mentorship, knowledge sharing, and collaborative problem solving
- When required, participate in the on-call rotation and act as a technical escalation point for critical incidents
Requirements
- 5+ years of experience in Software Engineering or a similar role, with preferably experience in Golang
- Proficiency in development flow based on git and GitHub
- Strong sense of testing, including unit tests and integration tests
- Ability to communicate recommendations for improvements on current systems, processes, and services as needed
- Exhibit a strong ability to adapt in a dynamic and ever-changing environment
- Ability to solve problems, especially to identify the source of the problem, and create and test solutions
- Proven team-leading experience with the ability to mentor and guide team members
Nice to haves
While not specifically required, tell us if you have any of the following.
- Hands-on experience with Docker, Kubernetes, and cloud-native infrastructure (preferably GCP)
- Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines (e.g., CircleCI) and engineering operations tooling (e.g., Jira)
- Experience working with polyglot environments (e.g., Python, Ruby, Node.js)
- Experience in using tracing and metrics in deriving performance optimizations and troubleshooting
- Japanese language proficiency is a plus, but not required
