(Senior) Staff Engineer - Backend (AWS Platform) gesucht in Berlin
Role details
Job location
Tech stack
Job description
We are hiring a Staff / Senior Staff Backend Engineer to lead the transformation of our AWS-based backend platform, built primarily with TypeScript Lambda functions. This role goes beyond feature delivery: you will reshape architecture, improve system reliability, and define how backend services evolve over the next phase of growth.
You will act as a force multiplier across teams, setting technical direction while staying hands-on where leverage is highest.
While this is a backend role, we value engineers with an end-to-end mindset. We expect strong partnership across the stack and departments to deliver high-quality, reliable outcomes.
Your tasks
- Lead modernization of backend services and platform foundations, improving reliability, clarity, and long-term maintainability
- Evaluate and evolve architecture choices: runtime, service boundaries, and patterns (serverless, containerized services, microservices) as the platform scales
- Establish and drive best practices for TypeScript and AWS, including API design, event-driven patterns, error handling, resilience, and operational excellence
- Reduce complexity and operational risk through simplification, standardization, and stronger engineering defaults
- Improve observability and reliability (metrics, tracing, structured logging, alerting, runbooks, incident learning)
- Partner closely with product, design, frontend, and infrastructure to enable faster and safer delivery
- Help improve cross-stack developer experience (shared contracts, typing, integration patterns, tooling)
- Occasionally contribute to frontend-adjacent work to unblock teams or improve end-to-end reliability, while remaining primarily backend-focused
- Drive pragmatic decision-making: refactor vs. rebuild, prioritization, sequencing of change
- Mentor senior engineers and raise the bar through reviews, coaching, shared patterns, and architectural guidance
Requirements
- 8+ years of engineering experience (or equivalent impact)
- Strong hands-on backend experience in AWS, including Lambda, IAM, API Gateway, and event-driven services
- Strong TypeScript expertise in backend/service contexts
- Proven ability to lead system-level transformations in production environments (not just greenfield)
- Strong understanding of distributed systems, failure modes, and operational trade-offs
- Ability to think in terms of platform leverage: shared primitives, safer defaults, automation, and developer experience
- Experience decomposing monoliths or untangling tightly coupled services
- Experience working with data stores (SQL and/or NoSQL) in distributed systems
- Practical knowledge of Infrastructure-as-Code (CDK and/or Terraform), CI/CD, and modern cloud tooling
- Solid security mindset: IAM design, least privilege, secure service patterns, and a healthy respect for compliance requirements
- Ability to balance technical purity with business constraints
- Strong written and verbal communication - you can explain trade-offs clearly and influence decisions across teams If you enjoy shaping frontend platforms, improving performance and reliability at scale, and raising the bar across teams - we'd love to talk.