Senior Software Engineer - Email Channel

Hi, I'm Brian, Senior Director of Engineering at Customer.io. We're looking for experienced engineers who want to own a channel end to end — from the infrastructure that delivers billions of messages reliably, to the product surfaces our customers use to build, send, and analyze their campaigns. You'll work across the stack, bringing both systems thinking and product craft to one of the most technically rich problem spaces in the industry.

You don't need email experience to apply. We can teach you the email domain. The engineers who thrive here are the ones who love learning a deep problem space, not only the ones who arrive already knowing it.

About Customer.io

Over 9,000 companies — from scrappy startups to global brands — use our platform to send billions of emails, push notifications, in-app messages, and SMS every day. Customer.io powers automated communication that people actually want to receive.

We help teams send smarter, more relevant messages using real-time behavioral data. Under the hood: Go, React, Ember and AI help us ship fast and scale with confidence.

What We Value

Ownership You own problems end to end. You move fast, act like an owner, and thrive in ambiguity. You've led complex projects before, whether officially or not, and you're ready to do it again.

Engineers with product taste You think like a user, not just an engineer. You care how your systems power real customer value — and how to make them better.

A healthy skepticism for "the way things are done" You bring rigor and creativity. Best practices matter — but never more than forward motion.

What You'll Do

• Build and evolve the frontend experiences customers use to create, preview, and analyze campaigns — editors, configuration, and analytics dashboards
• Design and scale backend systems that process high volumes of messages and events: queue management, retry logic, rate limiting, and real-time event pipelines
• Build automated systems that respond intelligently to feedback signals from external providers — classification, suppression, throttling, and health scoring
• Partner with in-house domain experts to turn their knowledge into automated tooling — you bring the systems skills, they bring the email depth
• Instrument and monitor channel health end to end: signal detection, anomaly alerting, and observability
• Own problems end to end — from architecture and schema design to testing, deployment, and monitoring
• Share knowledge and raise the bar through short videos, thoughtful writing, and mentorship
• Use AI agents to make multi-file changes by scoping the work, writing the prompt, and verifying the output

What We're Looking For

• 7+ years of experience building scalable, distributed systems in Go (or similar statically typed languages)
• Experience building product-facing frontend features in React or similar frameworks, with attention to UX quality and polish
• Experience building or consuming APIs that handle high-throughput async workloads — event streams, queues, and systems that degrade gracefully under load
• Comfort integrating with external systems you don't control — third-party APIs, rate limits, opaque failure modes — and designing for resilience around them
• Comfort working in cloud-native environments (AWS, GCP)
• Familiarity with relational databases (we use MySQL primarily) and an understanding of performance tradeoffs
• Experience with observability tooling and operating production systems
• A bias for action over perfection, and pride in owning technical decisions

Nice to have: Familiarity with email infrastructure — deliverability, authentication standards (SPF/DKIM/DMARC), sender reputation, or high-volume sending

Compensation & Benefits

We believe in transparency. Starting salary for this role is $150,000 - $200,000 USD (or equivalent in local currency) depending on experience and subject to market rate adjustment.

We know our people are what make us great, and we're committed to taking great care of them. Our inclusive benefits package supports your well-being and growth, including 100% coverage of medical, dental, vision, mental health, and supplemental insurance premiums for you and your family. We also offer 16 weeks paid parental leave, unlimited PTO, stipends for remote work and wellness, a professional development budget, and more.

See full benefits here →

Our Process

No gotchas, no trick questions — just a clear, human process designed to help both of us make an informed decision.

• Application — We review everyone with care. Tell us why you're interested.
• Recruiter Call (30 mins) — Let's chat about what you're looking for and how we work.
• Hiring Manager Interview (60 mins) - Talk with one of our hiring managers about your working style and a project you've owned end-to-end, plus a short AI-assisted coding exercise.
• Technical Interview (60 mins) — A collaborative system design conversation focused on scaling challenges.
• Take-Home Assignment — Complete a short, realistic task similar to what you'd work on here.
• Assignment Review Call (60 mins) — Walk us through your work and discuss tradeoffs, priorities, and how you'd iterate.
• Project Deep Dive (60 minutes: A focused conversation on a technical project you've owned end-to-end, and how you balance planned work against urgent, customer-impacting issues.

All final candidates will be asked to complete a background check and employment verifications as part of our pre-employment process.

Customer.io recognizes the stifling impact of systemic injustice on diverse communities. We commit to using our influence to increase inclusion and equity within the tech industry. We strive to build an inclusive team culture, implement bias-free hiring practices, and develop community partnerships to expand our global impact.

Zoom is the only video conference platform that we use, virtual interviews will be conducted using the video capability (i.e., not via the chat), and offers will be extended in writing on official Customer.io letterhead. Please be vigilant in all of your job search activity, and if you have any questions please contact jobs@customer.io.

Join us!

We believe in empathy, transparency, responsibility, and, yes, a little awkwardness. If you're excited by what you read and want to build software that makes communication better for everyone — apply now.