Patreon is a media and community platform where over 300,000 creators give their biggest fans access to exclusive work and experiences. We offer creators a variety of ways to engage with their fans and build a lasting business including: paid memberships, free memberships, community chats, live video, and selling to fans directly with one-time purchases.

Ultimately our goal is simple: fund the creative class. And we're leaders in that space, with:

$10 billion+ generated by creators since Patreon's inception

100 million+ free memberships for fans who may not be ready to pay just yet, and

25 million+ paid memberships on Patreon today.

We're continuing to invest heavily in building the best creator platform with the best team in the creator economy and are looking for a Staff Software Engineer, Backend Platform to support our mission.

This role can be based in San Francisco or New York and open to those who are able to be in-office 3 days per week on a hybrid work model.

About the Team

The Backend Platform team builds the foundational systems and infrastructure that power Patreon's creator platform. We're responsible for the core backend services, APIs, databases, infrastructure, and developer tooling that enable product teams across the company to ship quickly, reliably, and at scale. This team is growing and investing in foundational platform capabilities that will support Patreon's next phase of scale and product expansion.

About the Role

Design and drive technical solutions for key systems within Patreon's backend platform and foundational infrastructure

Lead architecture and implementation of scalable distributed systems, APIs, event-driven systems, and platform services

Contribute to and lead modernization efforts across backend architecture, service boundaries, data access patterns, and infrastructure

Help establish and uphold technical standards and best practices around reliability, performance, scalability, and maintainability

Partner with product engineering teams to ensure platform capabilities align with business and product needs

Drive technical decision-making for your team's projects, partnering cross-functionally as needed

Help evolve operational maturity around incident management, resiliency, and production excellence

Mentor Senior and mid-level engineers through design reviews, technical guidance, and hands-on collaboration

What you'll need

Significant experience building large-scale backend systems, with depth in distributed systems and platform architecture (typically 6-8+ years, or equivalent demonstrated expertise)

Strong expertise in distributed systems, high-throughput APIs, and low-latency architectures that support millions of DAUs

Experience with databases, caching systems, and storage technologies (e.g. MySQL, Postgres, Redis, DynamoDB)

Strong understanding of data modeling, storage systems, caching, queues, and event-driven architectures

Experience in performance optimization across APIs, databases, caching layers, and distributed services

Strong operational excellence mindset, including incident response and production debugging

Experience operating systems in cloud-native environments such as AWS and Kubernetes-based infrastructure

Proficiency in one or more backend languages such as Python, Go, Java, or Rust

Ability to communicate architectural trade-offs clearly in writing and in cross-functional forums

Experience mentoring Senior and mid-level engineers and contributing to engineering culture through design reviews, documentation, or team standards

We hire talented and passionate people from different backgrounds because workplace diversity and inclusion is critical to our ability to serve creators worldwide. If you're excited about a role but your past experience doesn't match with every bullet point outlined above, we strongly encourage you to apply anyway. If you're a creator at heart, are energized by our mission, and share our company values, we'd love to hear from you.

About Patreon

Patreon powers creators to do what they love and get paid by the people who love what they do. Our team is passionate about making this mission and our core values come to life every day in our work. Through this work, our Patronauts: