Staff Software Engineer - X Developer Platform

Role: Staff Software Engineer - X Developer Platform
Location: Palo Alto
Salary Range: $265,000 - $300,000 + Equity

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Who We Are

Our mission broadly is to achieve the state of X Everything app and be the clear digital town square of Earth. We make our ever-expanding universe of social media data available via our extensive API suite with consistent and reliable architecture so the world can realize the full potential of this amazing stream of information. 

X Developer Platform is responsible for the partner ecosystem of B2B and B2C developers that build solutions using X’s extensive API set. With more than 500 million active users and billions of tweets per week, X offers robust, real-time and historical data, insights and engagement opportunities across a wide range of organizations and industries. Our API gives you the ability to learn from and engage with the conversation on X and we supply developers to further uncover, build on, and share the value of this conversation with the world.
 

If you're interested in building products that customers use daily to make key business decisions, resolve their own customers’ concerns, and drive groundbreaking research. Our team helps collect, process, enrich and deliver hundreds of billions of signals a day through the X API platform. Our products are highly available, scalable, optimized, respectful of X's user base, and truly essential for our customers who build their businesses on X data. We work closely with our Product and Business orgs,  alongside our customers to make sure we build the right products at the right time.
 

What You’ll Do

• Lead System Design & Architecture: Own the end-to-end technical design and implementation of the X Developer Platform, ensuring scalability, reliability, performance, and extensibility for a global user base.

• Drive Technical Strategy: Define and execute the long-term roadmap for developer APIs, infrastructure, and tools, aligning with X’s mission to accelerate human connection and discovery.

• Mentor & Collaborate: Guide a team of engineers through complex technical challenges, fostering a culture of innovation, rigor, quality, and ownership while collaborating cross-functionally with product, design, and operations teams.

• Build for Scale: Develop and optimize systems that handle billions of requests, leveraging cutting-edge technologies to support real-time data processing and high-availability services.

• Solve Hard Problems: Tackle ambiguous, high-stakes challenges—think distributed systems, performance bottlenecks, or novel integrations—delivering solutions that set industry benchmarks.

• Influence Company-Wide Impact: Partner with leadership to identify opportunities where the Developer Platform can unlock new capabilities for X’s ecosystem.

Who You Are:

We’re seeking a Staff Software Engineer to lead the evolution of our Developer Platform. You’re a technical visionary with a proven track record of designing and delivering complex, high-impact systems. You thrive in ambiguity, excel at mentoring teams, and are passionate about creating tools that empower developers to solve real-world problems. You’re ready to shape the technical strategy for a platform that serves millions globally. 

• Strong desire to ship incredible products with a fast paced & hardcore eng team

• Eager to build and architect APIs that work with tremendous scale and make it easy for data partners to build new products that enable more innovation.

• You wish to tackle hard product and engineering challenges while working alongside smart and exceptional people with similar skill sets. 

• You’re excited to take on complex problems, learn quickly, and persist towards a great solution using First Principles method

• You are not afraid to make mistakes or remove barriers for team in order to achieve a higher outcome

• You have experience working with big data processing (Hadoop, Storm, Scalding, Kafka etc) and NoSQL databases.

Skill Requirements:

Proven Expertise in Designing and Scaling High-Performance APIs.
The candidate must have 8+ years of experience designing, building, and scaling RESTful or GraphQL APIs that handle massive throughput (e.g., 100M+ requests/day) and real-time data, with a track record of optimizing for latency, reliability, and cost-efficiency.
Deep Mastery of Distributed Systems and Fault-Tolerant Architecture.
Demonstrated expertise in distributed systems design, including hands-on experience with technologies like Kafka, Redis, or Kubernetes, and a history of building fault-tolerant, self-healing systems that maintain 99.99% uptime.

Core Requirements:

• MS or BS in Computer Science

• 8+ years of industry experience building commercial software apps or services 

• Exceptional Industry experience with Scala or JVM-based programming language

• Great Distributed Systems experience (Kafka is a requirement)

• Experience working with RPC frameworks (like thrift) and microservices

• Understanding of core CS concepts i.e. common data structures and algorithms

• Experience with front-end development tech (e.g., HTML, CSS, JavaScript

• Experience with cloud platforms and services (e.g., AWS, Azure, Google Cloud)