Staff Backend Engineer, DevOps

🚂About Pulley

Pulley's mission is to make it easier for anyone to start a company. We believe that more startups should exist and that founder-led companies are more successful in the long term. With Pulley’s cap table management tools, companies can better understand and optimize their equity for the long term. Starting a company is hard enough. Managing equity shouldn’t be. 

We’re a high-performing team on a mission to redefine how early-stage leaders build and manage their companies in an AI-native world. As AI reshapes how businesses operate, we see a unique opportunity to reimagine equity and business management from the ground up. A brand-new, unsolved challenge that we’re excited to tackle.

Pulley is growing quickly with over 4,000 customers, including startups like Linear, Runway, Fathom, and Roam. Our trajectory is fueled by top investors like Founders Fund, Stripe, General Catalyst, Caffeinated Capital, 8vc, Elad Gil, and other incredible angels. All of our growth has been organic, and we’re expanding the team to meet the growing demand.

We’re looking for passionate, execution-focused self-starters to help us build the next generation of tools for founders.

🌟 About the role

We're looking for a Staff Backend Engineer to lead the design and implementation of critical infrastructure and DevOps systems that power Pulley's platform at scale. This is a foundational role focused on building resilient deployment pipelines, monitoring systems, and backend infrastructure that enables our engineering teams to ship features rapidly and reliably.

As a Staff Engineer, you'll set the technical direction for our platform infrastructure, working across deployment automation, observability, performance optimization, and system reliability. You'll play a pivotal role in modernizing our DevOps practices, establishing scalable CI/CD pipelines, and ensuring our backend services are robust, observable, and efficiently deployed.

This role is ideal for someone who thrives in complex infrastructure challenges, loves building systems that enable other engineers to move faster, and wants to establish the operational backbone for a rapidly scaling fintech platform.

🛠 What You'll Do

• Design and implement scalable deployment infrastructure, CI/CD pipelines, and release automation systems
• Lead architecture decisions that improve system reliability, observability, and operational excellence
• Build and maintain monitoring, alerting, and logging infrastructure to ensure high system availability
• Develop internal tooling and platforms that accelerate engineering velocity and reduce operational overhead
• Collaborate with backend engineers to optimize application performance and infrastructure efficiency
• Establish best practices for infrastructure-as-code, container orchestration, and cloud resource management
• Champion operational excellence through automated testing, deployment guardrails, and incident response procedures
• Mentor engineers on DevOps practices and help establish a culture of reliability across the team

🙌 What You Bring

• 8+ years of experience building backend systems with strong focus on infrastructure and DevOps
• Expert-level proficiency in Go, with experience building high-performance backend services
• Deep experience with cloud platforms (GCP), container orchestration (Kubernetes/Docker), and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform/CloudFormation)
• Strong background in CI/CD systems, automated deployment pipelines, and release management
• Experience with observability tools (Prometheus, DataDog) and distributed system monitoring
• Track record of improving system reliability, reducing deployment friction, and scaling infrastructure
• Systems-thinking mindset with focus on automation, reproducibility, and operational efficiency
• Ability to mentor engineers and drive technical excellence across infrastructure practices

Bonus Points For:

• Experience in fintech or highly regulated environments
• Background with database performance optimization and infrastructure scaling
• Experience building internal developer platforms and tooling

✨ Why work at Pulley?

• We’ve moved beyond early-stage uncertainty - Our product has traction and we’re building on a solid foundation, but we’re still early enough in our journey where your work will directly shape the company’s trajectory as we scale.
• Make it easier for anyone to start a company - Founders turn bold ideas into reality - building things that might not exist otherwise. Starting a company is hard enough. Managing equity shouldn’t be. Pulley exists to make equity management simpler, smarter, and more accessible for founders from day one.
• Work with a high-performing and passionate team - We value the concept of stunning colleagues and we’re thoughtful about creating a team that is excited about building a great company together. Here are our operating principles:
• Principles over playbooks - Understand why strategies succeed or fail by asking questions. When you know the ‘why’, you can adapt, innovate, and find new paths to success.
• Momentum over speed - Find the best path to deliver value. Build momentum to balance the short term wins vs longer term success.
• Good taste over data - Take bold bets and trust your instincts to find the unlikely bet.
• Ideas over egos - Let the best idea win, no matter where it comes from. Cultivate an environment where everyone feels empowered to speak up.
• Gladiator over spectator - Execute; don’t just critique or ideate. You’re the one putting in the work, sweating the details, and driving for results.
• Conviction over consensus - Have the courage to back your ideas strongly, even when they defy the status quo. Disagree and commit.
• Proactive over passive - Drive your own clarity and pull for context. Ask questions, dig deeper, and grasp the full picture.

💚 Benefits

• Competitive salary and equity
• Medical, Dental, and Vision insurance
• Unlimited PTO + Winter holiday break
• Parental leave
• Generous stipends for WFH, learning, wellness, and AI tools
• 401(k) match (US) / Pension match (Canada)

Annual Salary Range: $185,000—$220,000 USD

Plus equity to be negotiated. The range above reflects the typical salary range for this role. The final offer will depend on factors such as your experience, interview performance, level, and other considerations assessed during the hiring process.