Staff Backend Engineer - Communications Platform

Squarespace is a design-driven platform empowering millions of entrepreneurs across 200+ countries to build brands, monetize, and scale their businesses online.

As the Backend Staff Software Engineer for the Communications Platform, you will serve as the senior technical authority leading a high-impact engineering team. The Communications Platform is a core engine powering customer engagement across Squarespace—delivering over 1.75+ million emails, push notifications, and in-product messages daily. In this hands-on technical role, you will write high-quality Java code, lead system architecture, shape platform modernization, and harden distributed backend services utilizing Kafka, MongoDB, and CockroachDB. You will serve as an internal platform owner whose APIs, abstractions, and system reliability directly shape developer velocity across the company.

Key Responsibilities

• Architecture & System Design: Drive the architectural strategy, design, and execution for high-throughput notification channels—including Email Delivery, In-Product Notifications, and Push Notifications.
• Hands-On Technical Leadership: Write production-grade Java code, lead technical design reviews, conduct thorough code reviews, and elevate technical execution across the codebase.
• Platform Modernization & Hardening: Modernize legacy platform services, eliminate systemic architecture risks, optimize async data flows, and build resilient distributed systems that prevent outages.
• Internal Platform Abstractions: Design clean, scalable APIs and backend primitives that enable internal Squarespace product teams to integrate multi-channel messaging capabilities seamlessly.
• Engineering Mentorship: Mentor backend and frontend engineers in distributed systems design, operational excellence, decision-making, and long-term ownership.
• Cross-Team Technical Alignment: Serve as a key technical leader across company-wide architecture initiatives, communicating complex technical tradeoffs to engineering managers and executive leadership.

Requirements

Practical Experience & Engineering Depth

• 10+ years of professional backend software engineering experience, with significant time spent building and operating large-scale, customer-facing distributed systems.
• Deep hands-on expertise in Java and backend microservices architecture.
• Mastery of asynchronous processing frameworks, message queues/event streaming (Apache Kafka), and production data stores (MongoDB, CockroachDB, or relational databases).
• Proven track record of technical leadership at the Staff or Senior-Plus level, influencing architecture across multiple service domains.

Platform Engineering & Reliability

• Practical experience evolving, modernizing, and refactoring existing production systems without requiring disruptive ground-up rewrites.
• Deep familiarity with distributed systems failure modes, high availability patterns, observability, and performance optimization.
• Experience operating in platform engineering contexts where internal product developers are your primary customers.

Preferred Qualifications

• Strong domain background in multi-channel communications infrastructure (email delivery providers, push notification gateways, in-product messaging engines).
• Degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.

Total Rewards & Benefits

• Compensation & Equity: Cash compensation of $185,500 – $299,000 USD + equity grants (common stock options).
• Healthcare & Wellbeing: Choice of medical plans (including options with 100% employer-covered premiums), fertility/adoption benefits, Headspace subscription, and global EAP.
• Time Off & Parental Care: Flexible paid time off, 12 weeks of fully paid parental/family care leave, and observed company holidays.
• Office Perks & Workplace: Dog-friendly NYC office featuring a private rooftop, complimentary catered lunches and snacks, pretax commuter benefits, twice-yearly Hack Weeks, and active ERGs.