Staff Backend Engineer

We are hiring a Staff Backend Engineer with Technical Lead responsibilities who will take ownership of complex backend domains and drive architectural clarity, execution quality, and cross-functional alignment across the Cloud organization.

Your initial focus will likely involve a high-priority domain such as Billing, Payments, or Usage Metering, but this is not a billing-only role. Because Qdrant operates in a fast-paced, evolving environment, this person must be comfortable—and motivated—to take ownership of other business-critical domains as priorities shift.

This is a senior individual contributor role with broad architectural influence, strong cross-functional leadership expectations, and a direct impact on the direction of our Cloud platform.

We prefer candidates based in EMEA for optimal collaboration.

Requirements

Technical Leadership & Architecture

• Own the architecture and technical strategy of one or more high-impact backend domains.

• Drive system design, establish service boundaries, and shape long-term platform evolution.

• Modernise legacy systems and lead migrations toward clean, scalable, maintainable architectures.

• Define engineering standards, architectural guardrails, and review best practices.

• Ensure correctness, reliability, observability, and maintainability across the systems you own.

Technical Lead Responsibilities

• Provide technical direction for your domain and act as the main engineering point of contact.

• Collaborate with Product, Finance, Growth, Support, and Platform teams to translate requirements into robust engineering solutions.

• Coordinate execution across cross-functional contributors and ensure high-quality delivery.

• Communicate technical options, trade-offs, and risks clearly to both engineering and non-technical stakeholders.

• Lead design discussions, review significant PRs, and mentor Senior and Mid-level engineers.

• Help shape quarterly Cloud engineering priorities by representing the needs of your domain.

• Proactively identify risks and drive mitigation plans end-to-end.

Execution & Delivery

• Ensure technical execution is predictable, aligned, and sustainable.

• Remove blockers that hinder delivery or compromise system stability.

• Champion observability, operational excellence, and data correctness.

• Guide teams through ambiguity and evolving priorities.

Adaptability in a Fast-Paced Environment

• Bring relevant experience in a critical domain (billing/payments/usage metering strongly preferred), but be ready and motivated to take ownership of other business areas as the company evolves.

• Adapt quickly to new problem spaces, shifting priorities, and emerging business demands.

• Help create technical clarity in domains that may still be undefined or require rapid iteration.

Domain Expertise (Billing as a Strong Plus)

While the role is intentionally multi-domain, experience in one or several of the following is highly valuable:

• Billing, Payments, Pricing Models

• Usage Metering, Event Pipelines

• IAM / Identity & Access

• Provisioning, Orchestration, Infrastructure SaaS workflows

• Backoffice/Admin systems

• Financial correctness, reconciliation, auditability

• High-volume transactional systems

Requirements

Required Technical Expertise

• Strong proficiency in Python and Go (both required).

• Deep experience designing and evolving distributed systems.

• Excellent understanding of relational databases (PostgreSQL preferred).

• Familiarity with Kubernetes, Docker, and major cloud providers.

• Track record of building or significantly improving complex backend systems.

Required Leadership Capabilities

• Strong experience leading technical direction as a Senior or Staff IC.

• Ability to act as a Technical Lead across one or more domains.

• Excellent communication skills, including the ability to explain complex engineering concepts to non-engineers.

• Ability to mentor engineers and raise the technical bar across teams.

• Comfortable influencing roadmap decisions and representing your domain in leadership discussions.

• Ability to foresee risks and design solid mitigation plans.

Nice to Have

• Experience with billing, pricing, usage metering, payments, or reconciliation workflows.

• Experience with event-driven architectures, ledgers, data pipelines, or event sourcing.

• Experience with gRPC, GraphQL, or API-first design.

• Familiarity with observability tools like Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry.

• Background in SaaS, fintech, or marketplace payment systems.

Benefits

Why Join Us?

• Competitive compensation in a fully remote environment.

• A Staff-level role with significant autonomy, influence, and responsibility.

• Opportunity to own and reshape multiple business domains over time.

• Direct input into Cloud engineering strategy and architectural decisions.

• A high-performance engineering culture grounded in pragmatism, clarity, and continuous improvement.

• Work alongside experienced engineers, platform architects, and a strong cross-functional leadership team.