Staff Software Engineer - SDE 3

About Us:

Phyllo is a data gateway that allows social data to be accessed from source platforms (e.g. YouTube, Twitch, Upwork, Shopify, etc.). We build the underlying infrastructure that connects with every creator platform, maintain a live data feed to the systems used by these platforms to manage creators’ data, and provide a normalized data set so that businesses can use creators’ data in a simple yet impactful way.

More info at: Our website: https://www.getphyllo.com/

About the role:

As a Staff Software Engineer (SDE3) at Phyllo, you will shape the technical direction of key backend systems and lead complex initiatives across services and teams. This is an individual contributor role combining deep Python and distributed systems expertise with fluency in agentic development. You will turn ambiguous problems into practical designs and guide delivery through production. Your balance of implementation, agent direction, review and architecture work will vary. You must remain able to independently write, understand and debug production code, while taking responsibility for the quality and impact of the software you ship.

What you'll be expected to do:

• Lead backend and platform initiatives from problem definition through design, rollout and operation. Coordinate dependencies, sequence work across teams, and resolve technical risks early.
• Design resilient distributed services, data pipelines and APIs. Account for external platform rate limits, partial failures, schema changes and data freshness as you improve scalability and data correctness.
• Write technical proposals and participate actively in architecture reviews. Challenge assumptions, explain tradeoffs, build agreements and guide designs within your area through implementation and migration.
• Raise engineering quality through substantive code reviews of human-written and agent-generated changes, checking correctness, maintainability, tests, performance, security and failure handling. Implement or debug critical paths when needed.
• Use coding agents extensively across development, testing, refactoring and debugging. Establish effective team practices through clear repository context, reusable workflows and meaningful verification, while retaining engineering ownership.
• Own the production health of your systems through observability, safe releases, incident investigation and preventive improvements. Track reliability, latency, data quality and operating cost to guide decisions.
• Partner with product, design and engineering colleagues to clarify customer needs and shape technical roadmaps. Balance delivery speed, system longevity and infrastructure cost when prioritizing work and technical debt.
• Mentor engineers, including senior engineers, through pairing, reviews and feedback. Help them grow their technical judgment and ownership, and unblock delivery beyond your own tasks.
• Provide technical thought leadership through design discussions, prototypes, technical writing and knowledge sharing. Evaluate emerging approaches with evidence and help the team decide what to adopt.
  

You’ll be a good fit if:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related technical field or equivalent practical experience.
• 8-9 years of experience in backend development.
• A track record of leading complex backend initiatives across services or teams, sustaining ownership in production, and improving outcomes for customers or other engineers.
• Strong production Python expertise is required. You can design, implement, test, profile and debug backend services, including concurrent or asynchronous code, and explain the behavior of code written by you or an agent.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals, including data structures, algorithms, complexity analysis, modular design and automated testing. You can diagnose difficult problems and improve unfamiliar codebases.
• Deep practical understanding of distributed systems, including messaging, delivery guarantees, consistency, idempotency, retries and backoff, backpressure, caching and failure isolation. You can explain tradeoffs using systems you have operated.
• Experience designing APIs and data models, maintaining backward compatibility, and evolving production databases safely. Strong SQL and relational database fundamentals, with sound judgment about when other storage models are appropriate.
• Substantial hands-on experience using coding agents for multi-step software changes, with tools such as Claude Code, Codex, Cursor or equivalent. You can supply context, define acceptance criteria, delegate bounded tasks, redirect poor approaches, and independently verify code and tests against requirements.
• Experience operating backend systems in the cloud, using CI/CD, observability and safe rollout practices. Sound security judgment around authentication, authorization, secrets and sensitive data, including when using coding agents.
• Clear technical writing and communication. You can lead constructive code and design reviews, explain tradeoffs to different audiences, influence decisions without formal authority, and mentor experienced engineers.

Preferred Experiences:

• Front-end development with React and JavaScript or TypeScript, including integrating interfaces with backend APIs and collaborating on complete product experiences.
• Social data platforms, developer-facing APIs, third-party integrations or data ingestion systems with demanding freshness and reliability requirements.
• Reusable agent workflows, repository instructions or developer tooling adopted by a team, with demonstrated improvements in delivery or quality.
• Scaling products or platforms in a growing startup, including migrations, performance tuning or reducing operational overhead.

What we offer:

• Hybrid Working Environment: Work both from the office and remotely as needed for a better work-life balance.
• Flexible Hours: Choose to work in the hours you feel the most productive.
• Innovate and Evolve: We’re building a high-growth, high-autonomy culture. We rely less on job titles and more on cultivating an environment where anyone can contribute, the best ideas win, and personal growth is driven by expanding impact and less by title.