Staff Software Engineer, Product - Customer.io

About Customer.io

Over 9,000 companies — from scrappy startups to global brands — use our platform to send billions of emails, push notifications, in-app messages, and SMS every day. Customer.io powers automated communication that people actually want to receive.

We help teams send smarter, more relevant messages using real-time behavioral data. Under the hood: Go, React, and AI help us ship fast and scale with confidence.

What We Value

• End-to-end ownership: You take on the problems nobody's claimed — the ones that span squads with no obvious owner — and carry them from a fuzzy first conversation to what's actually live. If it touches the customer, it's yours to chase down.
• Comfort in ambiguity: Half-formed problems and conflicting signals are your starting material, not a blocker. You define the problem before you solve it, form a point of view on what's worth building, and move without waiting for someone else to de-risk the call.
• Customer-first, always: You think from the customer's problem backward, not the codebase forward. Every technical call traces back to what it does for the person on the other end of the message — and you can explain that connection to people who don't write code.
• A healthy skepticism for "the way things are done": You retire practices that have outlived their usefulness, including ones you helped build. Best practices matter — but never more than forward motion.
• Force multiplication: Shipping your part isn't the bar. You bring in the right people before a problem becomes theirs to clean up, and you leave enough behind — docs, patterns, delegation — that the team keeps moving without you in the room.

What You'll Do

• Own important, ambiguous problems from initial framing through launch and iteration. Set direction, align partners, and stay accountable for the result.
• Partner with product, design, and data to shape priorities, scope the work, and define how success will be measured.
• Lead technical decisions across the stack, including architecture, performance, reliability, and maintainability.
• Lead work across teams and systems. Build alignment, resolve technical disagreements, and keep complex initiatives moving.
• Improve engineering practices through mentorship, reusable patterns, and clear technical guidance.
• Use AI throughout your engineering work, with sound judgment about where it helps, where it falls short, and how its output should be reviewed.
• Participate in an on-call rotation as required, supporting the systems the team builds.

What We're Looking For

• A track record of leading complex work across teams or systems and delivering meaningful customer, business, or engineering outcomes.
• Strong backend engineering experience, with the ability to work across the stack and lead end-to-end technical decisions.
• Strong product and technical judgment, especially when the problem or path forward is unclear.
• The ability to influence experienced peers and align teams without formal authority.
• Experience using metrics, experimentation, and observability to guide decisions and improve production systems.
• Regular, hands-on use of AI across the software development lifecycle, with the judgment to adapt as tools change while remaining accountable for quality, security, and outcomes.

Compensation & Benefits

Starting salary for this role is $200,000 - $280,000 USD depending on experience, with a 10% annual bonus target. Comprehensive benefits include 100% coverage of medical, dental, vision, mental health, and supplemental insurance premiums, 16 weeks paid parental leave, unlimited PTO, stipends for remote work and wellness, and a professional development budget.