Staff Engineer

HackerRank helps thousands of companies like OpenAI, NVIDIA, and Amazon hire developers based on their skills vs. pedigree, and also nurtures a community of millions of developers to upskill themselves to become next-gen developers.

The people at HackerRank care deeply about their work and have an extremely intense work ethic. In many companies, speed & quality is a tradeoff. At HackerRank, it’s not -- we expect you to ship in about half the time that most competent people think is possible while maintaining a standard of quality you’d proudly sign your name on. The only way to make this happen is if you truly love your craft and are deeply committed to growth.

About the role

This is a senior IC role for a backend specialist who can alternate between two operating modes: (1) shaping platforms that many product teams build on, and (2) diving deep with a team to crack a hard, high-stakes technical problem. You will also build AI-native capabilities into our platform (LLM orchestration, evaluation, cost and latency controls, guardrails), build novel systems, and raise the reliability, performance, and developer experience across services.

You will partner across multiple product groups, write crisp technical strategy, and be the engineer others look to for judgment, taste, and depth.

What you’ll do

• Align engineering roadmap with business outcomes. Translate company goals and customer needs into a technical roadmap. Communicate trade-offs and decisions in plain language

• Design and evolve core platforms for APIs, data, and AI that are scalable, observable, secure, and cost-aware ( thousands of concurrent assistant sessions, bursty traffic).

• Embed AI as a first-class concern: request orchestration, evaluation harnesses, guardrails and safety, prompt and data governance.

• Partner to deliver impact: Work with product managers and, when needed, customer-facing teams to drive impact.

• Mentor: raise the bar through reviews, design reviews, and hands-on pairing; be a model others emulate.

Who you are

• Backend/platform engineer with over 8 years of experience building and operating production-grade services with clear ownership of outcomes.

• Strong in system design and distributed systems, with hands-on experience across cloud platforms (AWS/GCP), containers & Kubernetes, Infrastructure as Code (Terraform), and CI/CD automation.

• Depth in one or more of Go, Java, Ruby, Python, or JavaScript, and ability to quickly learn new languages and frameworks.

• Proficient with Postgres/MySQL and NoSQL databases, and experienced in event-driven architectures using Kafka or similar for streaming and async

• Excellent communicator who writes clear documentation, explains trade-offs simply, mentors peers, and influences across teams without direct authority.

Even better if you have

• Exposure to AI systems in production such as LLM gateways, prompt or model evaluation and guardrails.

• Experience improving developer experience across the company.

• Public artifacts such as design write-ups, talks, or OSS contributions.

You’ll thrive in this role if

• You communicate with clarity and empathy, engaging both technical and non-technical stakeholders to build shared understanding and drive complex decisions forward.

• Balance long-term decisions with fast, incremental delivery.

• Care about developer experience as much as raw performance and reliability.

Want to learn more about HackerRank? Check out HackerRank.com to explore our products, solutions and resources, and dive into our story and mission here.

HackerRank is a proud equal employment opportunity and affirmative action employer. We provide equal opportunity to everyone for employment based on individual performance and qualification. We never discriminate based on race, religion, national origin, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, age, marital, veteran, or disability status. All your information will be kept confidential according to EEO guidelines.

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