Lead/Staff Backend Engineer

Join us at Gorilla and help shape the digital backbone of the energy transition. As a Lead/Staff Backend Engineer, you'll play a pivotal role in designing and scaling our data platform, powering key decisions for energy companies worldwide. We're committed to delivering high-performance, data-intensive SaaS solutions that help our clients maximize ROI and accelerate their path to net-zero. You’ll work at the intersection of deep technical expertise and strategic thinking, contributing not only to our product architecture but also to how we build and scale our engineering culture.

As a Staff Engineer in our Platform team, you’ll be a technical leader responsible for evolving and scaling the core API and data systems that support our pricing, forecasting, and analytics applications. You'll balance hands-on development with strategic contributions across teams. Your responsibilities will include:

• Lead architectural decisions across the platform, ensuring scalability, reliability, and performance in high-load, data-heavy environments.

• Drive cross-functional technical initiatives that have a broad impact across the product, working closely with Product Managers, Designers, and fellow Engineers.

• Mentor and support other engineers, fostering technical growth and best practices through design reviews, pair programming, and knowledge sharing.

• Design and build distributed systems that handle complex workflows and large volumes of energy data efficiently and securely.

• Take ownership of critical components, ensuring they evolve with the needs of the business and maintain a high bar for quality and resilience.

• Influence technical direction and culture, helping shape how we build systems and collaborate as a team.

• Contribute to strategic planning, helping define roadmaps and long-term technical vision in partnership with engineering and leadership.

• Expertise in Python, with a strong command of modern software design patterns, testing practices, and performance optimization.

• Extensive experience with relational databases and data modeling for high-throughput systems.

• Deep understanding of distributed systems design and the trade-offs involved in consistency, availability, and partition tolerance.

• Proven track record of working on data-intensive and high-load backends, ideally within SaaS environments.

• Familiarity with cloud platforms, especially AWS, and experience with infrastructure-as-code and container orchestration.

• Strong architectural intuition and ability to drive clarity in ambiguous, complex technical situations.

• Leadership experience through mentoring, leading initiatives, or shaping engineering practices across teams.

• Experience in defining and improving DevOps pipelines, observability, and platform reliability.

• Strong communication skills and a collaborative mindset—able to build alignment across stakeholders.

• Proactive and pragmatic: able to balance technical excellence with delivery impact.