Staff Software Engineer, Backend
Location
San Francisco, CA
Employment type
Full-time
About us
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.
About the role
You'll lead critical backend initiatives as Gamma scales from millions to hundreds of millions of users. This means architecting systems that never sleep, designing data models that support explosive growth, and solving the hardest scaling challenges we face. You'll have significant ownership over our backend architecture and infrastructure, working across the stack to ensure Gamma stays fast and reliable at massive scale.
As a Staff Engineer, you'll balance hands-on engineering with technical leadership. You'll ship to production daily, architect solutions to overcome bottlenecks, and mentor engineers while setting the standard for backend excellence. You'll work closely with engineering leadership, product, and infrastructure teams to build systems that handle our next order of magnitude of growth.
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.
What you'll do
  • Build APIs that power our expanding platform and design innovative data models that support our growing user base
  • Architect and lead scaling initiatives to handle our next order of magnitude of growth
  • Design and implement our tech stack including Kafka pipelines and real-time AI streaming systems
  • Lead performance optimization efforts and architect solutions to overcome bottlenecks
  • Implement live subscription updates as data changes using event streaming systems
  • Mentor engineers while collaborating across teams to create exceptional developer and user experiences
What you'll bring
  • 8+ years of experience as a software engineer with deep expertise in building large-scale production systems
  • Deep and comprehensive understanding of large relational databases, service-oriented architectures, and HTTP & REST protocols
  • Proven track record writing and maintaining highly-available web APIs
  • Extensive experience with event streaming systems like Redis Pubsub or Apache Kafka
  • Leadership experience in large, complex production-scale codebases
  • Passion for building APIs, scaling complex systems, and creating excellent web applications
  • Advanced experience with AI prompting and large language models
  • Experience programming with TypeScript, Prisma, and Apollo GraphQL
  • Experience with Terraform and AWS Services
  • (Nice to have) Computer science degree or related field
Compensation range:
$230K - $310K, plus competitive equity.
Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors, including but not limited to experience and expertise in the requirements listed above.
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.
Engineering at Gamma
Our tech stack:
We're building on a full Typescript stack centered around some of the most modern and popular technologies.
Frontend
AI
  • We use our own custom, open-source AI prompting framework, AIJSX. We have a lot of custom tools built in-house, but also new ones like Vercel AI SDK.
Our tiny team operates at massive scale:
1M+
AI generated presentations daily
70M
users around the world
6M+
AI images generated daily
1 trillion
LLM tokens processed per month
Life at Gamma
🤝 You’ll fit right in if…
  • You get energy from small teams doing big things.
  • You love when design, code, and storytelling overlap.
  • You default to action, even when the answer isn’t clear yet.
  • You value details, but know when to ship and move on.
  • You bring both the spreadsheets and the sparkle, equal parts workhorse and unicorn.
  • You believe AI should amplify creativity, not replace it.
  • You know kindness and intensity are not opposites.
  • You like working with people who care deeply: about their craft, their teammates, and the users on the other side of the screen.
💙 Who we are
Gamma is full of imaginative, passionate people who take their work seriously but not themselves. The culture is warm, a little quirky, and fueled by curiosity. It’s the kind of place where you’ll debate a pixel on Monday, laugh over someone’s keyboard setup on Tuesday, and ship something remarkable by Friday.
We care about craft, move with intention, and don’t mind getting a little scrappy. It’s fast, creative, and occasionally chaotic — but that’s what makes it interesting.
💬 Here’s a bit about what it’s like to work here, from people on the inside:
We asked the team what makes Gamma, Gamma. Here were some of their answers:
  • "quirky, inspiring, fun, a little wild in the best way"
  • "You can have an idea and just run with it."
  • "Everyone’s talented and humble — the mix keeps you sharp."
  • "We ship cool stuff, learn a ton, and laugh a lot doing it."
Meet the team
We're a team of dreamers and doers building in beautiful San Francisco 🌉
We're kabbadi enthusiasts, pickleballers, dog herders, woodworkers, keyboard nerds, potters, and more — and we can't wait to meet you!