Software Engineer, Platform

We're building the creative layer for modern communication. Every month, over a billion people make presentations — but the tools they use to make them haven't evolved in decades. We're changing that, using AI to disrupt a massive market.

📈 Millions of people rely on Gamma to create, teach, and persuade, creating more than 1 million gammas every day.

💻 We see Gamma as the next great workplace tool, combining viral B2C love with a massive B2B opportunity. We believe AI can be a true creative partner: one that understands context, clarity, and taste.

💸 We’ve reached a $2.1B valuation
, crossed $100M in annual recurring revenue
, and have been profitable since 2023.

💙 We're an imaginative, passionate team who takes our work seriously, but not ourselves. Our culture is warm, a little quirky, and fueled by curiosity.

You’ll own critical platform infrastructure supporting 70M+ users and scaling to hundreds of millions. This means architecting the core data model and storage systems powering Gamma's business, building real-time collaborative editing systems, high-volume event pipelines, and public APIs while driving technical strategy for databases, caching layers, distributed systems, and observability. You'll lead major infrastructure initiatives including database migrations, architecture refactors, and performance optimization at massive scale.

As a Staff Engineer on the Platform team, you'll define engineering standards and best practices across backend teams while mentoring engineers on system design, scalability patterns, and production excellence. You'll make critical build vs buy decisions, balance technical debt paydown with feature velocity, and collaborate with leadership to shape our multi-year platform roadmap. You'll bring high technical judgment, knowing when to over-engineer vs under-engineer and when perfection matters vs good enough.

Our team has a strong in-office culture and works in person 4–5 days per week in San Francisco. We love working together to stay creative and connected, with flexibility to work from home when focus matters most.

• Lead major infrastructure initiatives including database migrations, architecture refactors, and performance optimization at scale
• Define engineering standards and best practices across backend teams
• Mentor engineers on system design, scalability patterns, and production excellence
• Make build vs buy decisions for platform components and balance technical debt paydown with feature velocity
• Collaborate with leadership to shape multi-year platform roadmap
• Dive deep into gnarly technical problems including race conditions, performance bottlenecks, and data consistency issues

• 7+ years of backend engineering experience with deep expertise in distributed systems and data infrastructure
• Proven track record architecting systems that scaled through multiple orders of magnitude
• Expert-level proficiency in scalable APIs, databases (Postgre
  
  SQL, Redis), and event-driven architectures
• Experience with real-time systems including collaborative editing, Web Sockets, CRDTs, or similar conflict resolution
• Strong operational excellence with monitoring, alerting, incident response, and performance debugging at scale
• Proficiency in backend technologies (Node.js, Python, or similar) with deep understanding of tradeoffs
• Product-minded approach with ability to make technical decisions that unlock business value and user experience
• High autonomy, low ego with empathetic, reflective, self-aware, growth mindset that actively promotes psychological safety
• (Nice to have) Built platform infrastructure at high-growth startups
• (Nice to have) Experience with AI infrastructure or public API design

If you're interested in this role but you don't meet every requirement, we encourage you to apply anyway! We're always excited about meeting great people.

Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors, including but not limited to experience and expertise in the requirements listed above.

We're building on a full Typescript stack centered around some of the most modern and popular technologies.

We use our own custom, open-source AI…