Staff Software Engineer, Platform Engineering

We are seeking a Staff Software Engineer to join the Core Platform team within the Backend Platform organization. This team owns the foundational backend systems, shared services, and platform infrastructure that power critical product and business capabilities across the company.

In this role, you will operate as a senior technical leader responsible for designing, evolving, and modernizing core platform systems that are already in production. You will lead complex, high-impact initiatives such as large-scale migrations, architectural re-designs, and system modernization—often under constraints of uptime, scale, and backwards compatibility.

This is a hands-on engineering role with broad influence, where success is measured by platform stability, scalability, and long-term maintainability, not by feature velocity alone.

Learn more about our Engineering team

here: https://www.beforeyouapply.com/team/engineering-at-turo

• Design and operate core backend platform services used by multiple teams.

• Lead architectural improvements to systems showing stress at scale.

• Execute large, multi-phase migrations with minimal downtime and risk.

• Own and evolve event-driven and asynchronous systems.

• Define and maintain platform APIs, shared libraries.

• Partner with infrastructure, reliability, and security teams to ensure systems are secure, observable, and cost-efficient.

• Establish best practices for backend design, data consistency, caching, and production readiness.

• Provide technical mentorship through design reviews and architectural guidance.

• Influence the platform roadmap through system-level insight and risk assessment.

• Partner with product engineering teams and key stakeholders to shape how our platform supports the business, providing technical guidance, influencing architectural decisions, and driving solutions that have visible impact across the company.

• 8+ years of experience building backend or platform systems.

• Strong proficiency in Java, Kotlin, or Go.

• Experience designing and operating distributed systems in production.

• Solid understanding of service architecture and API design.

• Hands-on experience with AWS, Kubernetes, and Docker.

• Strong background in data modeling, consistency, and migrations.

• Experience operating high-availability systems.

• Ability to lead cross-team technical initiatives without formal authority.

• Clear, effective technical communication skills.

Bonus if you have:

• Experience leading large-scale infrastructure or cloud migrations.

• Hands-on experience with Kafka/MSK, Kinesis, or similar streaming systems.

• Proven success with zero-downtime data and schema migrations.

• Strong expertise in Redis or similar caching systems.

• Experience modernizing legacy backend stacks (e.g., Spring Boot / Java upgrades).

• Familiarity with OpenSearch/Elasticsearch operations and optimization.

• Experience upgrading and operating Kubernetes clusters at scale.

• Advanced use of Terraform and infrastructure-as-code.

• Ability to resolve systemic scalability or reliability issues through architecture changes.

For this role, the target base salary range in San Francisco is $182,000–$228,000 annually. This role is also eligible for equity and benefits. In general, our ranges reflect the market-based target for new hire salaries based on the level and location of the role. Within the range, individual pay is determined by objective factors assessed during the application and interview process, such as job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training. We encourage you to talk with your recruiter to learn more about the total compensation and benefits available for this role.

Turo highly values having employees working in-office to foster a collaborative work environment and company culture. This role will be in-office on a hybrid schedule — Turists will be expected to work in the office 3 days per week on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. Turo considers working in the office at least 3 days per week to be an essential function of this hybrid role. Your recruiter can share more information about the various in-office perks Turo offers.

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