Staff Software Engineer, Backend

About the role

Cresta Insights positions you as a Staff full-stack engineer with a backend focus, where you will shape the future of customer engagement from day one by delivering timely, actionable insights that drive business growth. You will be instrumental in building and operating a state-of-the-art Customer Data Platform that visualizes relevant insights for businesses post-onboarding and guides customer engagement across all touchpoints. In this role, you own the backend services and APIs that power core data pipelines and analytics for a global AI platform serving leading enterprises. You will collaborate closely with cross-functional partners to translate product requirements into robust, scalable backend solutions. You will design and optimize data storage layers to handle high-volume conversational data with low latency and high reliability. Ultimately, you will analyze and improve system architecture to remove performance bottlenecks and ensure security, scalability, and reliability at every layer. By joining early, you will help establish the engineering culture and technical foundations for Cresta's Romania hub while working remotely with a global team.

Key facts

What you'll do

Design, implement, and maintain backend services and APIs to support applications at scale using modern cloud-native patterns.

Build and optimize data storage solutions using Postgres, ClickHouse, and Elasticsearch to ensure high performance, scalability, and efficient query execution.

Collaborate with cross-functional teams, including frontend engineers, data scientists, and machine learning engineers, to deliver end-to-end solutions that meet business objectives.

Monitor and troubleshoot performance issues in distributed systems and databases to maintain high availability and reliability.

Write clean, maintainable, and efficient code following best practices for backend development and software craftsmanship.

Participate in code reviews, testing, and continuous integration efforts to uphold code quality and enable rapid, safe deployments.

Ensure security, scalability, and reliability of backend services through thoughtful design, observability, and iterative improvement.

Analyze and improve system architecture, focusing on performance bottlenecks, scaling strategies, and security hardening for data-intensive workloads.

Define and operate data pipelines and services that provide consistent, reliable, and timely insights to customers and internal stakeholders.

Contribute to technical documentation and architectural decisions that enable long-term maintainability and team scalability.

Partner with product and data teams to validate hypotheses, iterate on features, and measure impact through data-driven insights.

Support on-call responsibilities and incident response processes to ensure timely resolution of production issues.

Engage in knowledge-sharing activities such as pair programming, tech talks, and mentoring to elevate the overall engineering standard.

Continuously explore new technologies and practices that can improve efficiency, reliability, and developer experience within the stack.

Requirements

Proven experience as a Backend Engineer with a strong focus on database design, system architecture, and scalable service implementation.

Strong expertise in programming languages commonly used for backend development, with deep knowledge of data structures, algorithms, and system design principles.

Solid understanding of relational databases, query optimization, and transaction management in systems such as Postgres.

Experience working with high-throughput data systems and analytical databases like ClickHouse for real-time analytics and reporting.

Familiarity with search and analytics platforms such as Elasticsearch for full-text search, logging, and observability use cases.

Proficiency in writing clean, testable code and using version control systems such as Git to manage collaborative software development.

Strong debugging and troubleshooting skills to diagnose issues in distributed systems, APIs, and database workloads.

Understanding of security best practices, authentication, authorization, and data protection in cloud-based applications.

Experience with containerization and orchestration tools such as Docker and Kubernetes for deploying and operating backend services.

Comfort working in a fast-paced, remote-first environment with asynchronous communication and global collaboration across time zones.

Ability to take ownership of complex problems, prioritize multiple tasks, and drive projects from conception to production deployment.

Strong communication skills to articulate technical trade-offs, collaborate with non-technical stakeholders, and document decisions clearly.

A commitment to learning, mentoring, and improving engineering processes, tools, and culture within a growing organization.

Passion for building products that leverage AI and conversational data to create measurable business impact for enterprise customers.