Staff Software Engineer (Backend), Technical Support

The Role

As a Backend Software Engineer in the Support Team at Outreach, you will have the opportunity to leverage AI and cutting-edge technologies to empower Outreach’s Technical Support Engineers (TSEs) to deliver excellent customer service at scale.
This is a senior individual contributor role responsible for technical leadership, system design, and execution of core backend capabilities for an AI-powered support troubleshooting platform. This includes implementing AI tools that improve TSE efficiency, automate workflows, and integrate disparate tools into a unified interface. This role works very closely with the Engineering Manager, helping shape technical direction, guiding implementation, and ensuring the platform scales reliably while delivering continuous value. The L3 Software Engineer sets the technical bar, owns complex systems, and acts as a force multiplier for the team.

About the Team

The Outreach Technical Support team is a crucial resource that helps customers realize the full potential of the Outreach platform. The team is comprised of deeply technical, customer-obsessed support professionals that answer questions, address challenges and advocate for solutions that improve the Outreach customer experience

Basic Qualifications::
• Partner closely with the Engineering Manager to shape backend architecture and technical strategy.
• Design and evolve scalable, cloud-native backend systems in Python.
• Own the technical design and implementation of critical backend domains.
• Drive architecture decisions that balance scalability, performance, cost, and delivery speed.
• Lead the design and implementation of GenAI pipelines, including: data ingestion and normalization, embedding generation, semantic search and retrieval, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)
• Ensure GenAI systems are reliable, explainable, and continuously improving.
• Help define evaluation and feedback mechanisms for AI outputs.
• Set and uphold backend engineering standards.
• Lead high-quality code reviews, focusing on: correctness, maintainability, performance, security and data handling
• Mentor senior and mid-level engineers through technical guidance and reviews.
• Identify and proactively reduce technical debt.
• Ensure backend systems are observable and production-ready, including metrics, logging, and alerts.
• Lead efforts to improve reliability, scalability, and performance.
• Design systems with cost awareness, especially for GenAI workloads.
• Work with product design and engineers (PDE) partners, and support team stakeholders to deeply understand user workflows.
• Own backend services in production, including incident response and post-incident improvements.
• Document architecture, APIs, and key design decisions.
• Influence engineering practices beyond immediate team boundaries when needed.

Our Vision of You::
• 8–10+ years of backend software engineering experience.
• Deep expertise in Python for building production backend systems.
• Proven experience designing and scaling distributed systems.
• Strong system design skills, including: service decomposition, data modeling, high-availability architectures
• Experience operating large-scale, production systems in the cloud.
• Strong track record of technical leadership without direct authority.
• Extensive experience conducting code reviews and mentoring engineers.
• Ability to translate ambiguous problems into clear technical direction
• Hands-on experience with GenAI / LLM-based platforms.
• Experience with vector databases or semantic search systems.
• Experience building internal platforms or high-leverage infrastructure