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Principal Backend Engineer

Remote - US

Medium’s mission is to deepen understanding of the world and spread ideas that matter. We are building the best place for reading and writing on the internet—a place where today’s smartest writers, thinkers, experts, and storytellers can share big, interesting ideas; a place where ideas are judged on the value they provide to readers, not the fleeting attention they can attract for advertisers.

As we work towards this goal, we’re looking for an experienced Principal Backend Engineer to drive the evolution of Medium’s platform and product. This is a high-impact role where you’ll have the opportunity to lead by example, shape the technical direction of our product, and mentor the next generation of engineers. A Principal Engineer at Medium represents the highest level of IC on our engineering career ladder, entailing a combination of superlative technical acumen, product aptitude, and the ability to liaise with stakeholders and leaders across the company to drive business outcomes - if this sounds like you, we’d love to connect!

Role Overview

As our Principal Backend Engineer, you’ll own Medium’s backend platform, which powers the reading, writing, and discovery experiences for millions of users. You’ll focus on designing and scaling distributed systems, improving the reliability and performance of our services, and modernizing our infrastructure and event driven pipelines.

Your contributions won’t stop at Medium’s codebase: you’ll also be responsible for mentoring other engineers across the company, driving product direction through cross-functional collaboration, and distilling complex technical problems into clear projects for the team.

Key Responsibilities

  • Own the architecture for large-scale, complex product projects.
  • Own the implementation of critical features and systems, ensuring their ongoing health, scalability, and efficiency, while improving and modernizing the surrounding ecosystems.
  • Work with engineering, design, and product leadership to evolve existing features and innovate in new directions.
  • Lead efforts to improve engineering standards, tools, frameworks, and processes.
  • Mentor and develop other engineers on the team.
  • Attend Medium’s twice-yearly, in-person offsites (hosted in locations around the U.S.).

Skills, Knowledge and Expertise

  • You have a proven track record leveraging strong backend engineering fundamentals to build and ship distributed systems that power world-class products.
  • You have track record of mentoring and teaching the people around you - you are a multiplier on your team!
  • You embrace ambiguity and formulate go forward plans.
  • You are product minded and can lead a group from ideation to MVP to a polished production implementation that delights our users.
  • You understand every choice comes with tradeoffs and can make decisions under ambiguity, and ramp quickly on unfamiliar, complex problems to drive effective solutions on tight timelines.
  • You sweat the small stuff. You care about latency, data correctness, observability, cost, and operational excellence.
  • You give and receive direct feedback early and often. You’re focused on outcomes, not egos, and can respond without defensiveness.
  • You care about and contribute to the culture of the team you work with.

Nice to Haves

  • 10+ years of experience as a software engineer building large-scale distributed backend systems.
  • Expert-level proficiency in Go (BONUS: Experience designing systems leveraging AWS, Kafka, GraphQL, Kubernetes, and Datadog).
  • Experience operating at Medium’s product/user scale (millions of users; continuous delivery; feature flags).
  • Experience modernizing legacy code bases.
  • Experience utilizing modern AI tooling to accelerate development efforts.
  • You’ve personally used Medium and are excited to contribute to Medium’s mission of deepening understanding through human storytelling.

Benefits

In addition to the new skills you'll pick up, here's what else you'll enjoy by working at Medium:

  • Working with a fully distributed team: We’re fully remote and have teammates across the U.S. & France.
  • Healthcare benefits covered at 100% for employees and 70% for dependents.
  • Generous parental leave policy & child education stipend.
  • Mental health support through Talkspace.
  • Financial wellness support through Northstar.
  • Stipends for wellness, co-working, professional development, wifi and a one-time home office bonus.
  • Unlimited PTO and standard company holidays.
  • A discounted Medium membership!

At Medium, inclusion, diversity, and equity are core to how we work and what we build. We believe a more inclusive team creates a better product—one that’s intuitive, thoughtful, and serves a wide range of users. We strive to foster a supportive, fun, and challenging environment where people from all backgrounds can thrive.

We welcome applicants from all walks of life and strongly encourage those from historically underrepresented groups to apply. Our hiring process is built to ensure fairness and equal opportunity for everyone. Even if your experience doesn’t match every requirement, we’d still love to hear from you—your perspective and passion matter more than checking every box.

Learn more about our mission, operating principles, and culture:

Read about our story here.

Salary Range

$230,000 - $300,000 USD

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