Description
Who are we?
Auction Technology Group (ATG) is transforming the multi-billion-dollar global auction industry. Our platforms connect thousands of auction houses with buyers in over 170 countries, powering more than $15 billion in annual sales. Through innovative online auction technologies, we help auctioneers expand their reach, boost efficiency, and maximize value — while giving bidders unrivaled access to rare and specialized items. As a publicly traded company, ATG has scaled from $18 million to $170 million in revenue, with sustained growth beyond the pandemic. We are modernizing one of the last industries to fully go digital, building a global, category-defining business in the process.
Key Responsibilities
What are we hiring for?
As we continue to scale our engineering organization, we are looking for a Senior Software Architect to serve as the technical backbone of our backend platform. This is a senior individual contributor role that sits at the intersection of engineering leadership and technical craft. You will not be managing a team directly, but you will have significant influence over how all of our backend teams build, design, and evolve their systems.
In this role, you will own the architectural direction for our backend platform including defining patterns, setting standards, and guiding teams through design decisions that affect the reliability, scalability, and maintainability of our products. You will be a trusted partner to engineering leads and team managers across the company, helping them make the right technical choices without becoming a bottleneck utilizing our decentralized RFC and engineering guild model. Your work will range from authoring and reviewing technical design documents, to identifying systemic risk across services, to helping teams navigate complex trade-offs at critical moments in delivery.
ATG's backend platform is event-driven and distributed, built on an event-driven microservices foundation. You will also have visibility into how we approach shared infrastructure, observability, API design, and the evolution of our service mesh as we continue to consolidate platforms across the business.
Key Requirements
Who are we looking for?
You are a seasoned backend engineer who has grown into architecture through hard-won experience delivering production systems at scale. You think in systems and you communicate clearly, whether you are writing a TDD, presenting a trade-off analysis to an engineering lead, or pairing with a senior engineer to unblock a design decision. You are equally comfortable in the weeds of a distributed system problem and in a high-level conversation about platform direction.
You do not need to write all the code, but you are highly experienced so that your guidance is grounded and credible. You have strong opinions about API design, service boundaries, data consistency, and operational readiness with the interpersonal skills to make those opinions land without creating friction. You thrive in organizations where influence matters more than authority, and you take pride in making the engineers around you better.
Required Experience
8+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 3 years in an architecture, principal, or staff-level role
Deep expertise in designing distributed, event-driven backend systems at production scale
Strong familiarity with Go and/or Python in a microservices context
Bonus points for .NET and JVM experience, especially in migrating from monolith to microservices
Hands-on experience with message queuing and event streaming systems such as Kafka, RabbitMQ, or equivalent
Proven track record of authoring and governing technical design documents across multiple teams
Experience defining API contracts, service boundaries, and data ownership patterns
Strong working knowledge of AWS infrastructure, containerization (Docker/Kubernetes), and CI/CD pipelines
Ability to identify architectural risk early and drive resolution across teams without direct authority
Clear written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to translate complex technical decisions for non-engineering audiences
Nice to Have
Understanding of Domain Driven Design, Modular Monoliths, and the Strangler Pattern
Experience with search or recommendation infrastructure (Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, or similar)
Familiarity with MLOps or data platform architecture
Background in eCommerce, marketplace, or two-sided platform businesses
Experience working in a post-acquisition or platform consolidation environment
Experience on developer productivity tooling (libraries, templates, code generation, etc.) and infrastructure such as internal developer portals and platforms
Auction Technology Group is committed to fair and equitable compensation practices.
The pay range for this role is $170,000 to $185,000. Actual compensation packages are based on several factors that are unique to each candidate, including but not limited to skill set, depth of experience, certifications, and specific work location. This may be different in other locations due to differences in the cost of labor.
The total compensation package for this position may also include annual performance bonus, stock, benefits and/or other applicable incentive compensation plans.