Staff Software Engineer, Cameo
Backend
$175-215k
Office located in Downtown Chicago, IL
Marketplace for gifting personalised videos from celebrities
Open for applications
Marketplace for gifting personalised videos from celebrities
201-500 employees
Open for applications
$175-215k
Office located in Downtown Chicago, IL
201-500 employees
Company mission
Cameo's mission is to create the most personalised and authentic fan experiences in the world.
Role
Who you are
- 10+ years of professional backend engineering experience, with deep expertise in node.js (express, async patterns, etc.)
- A track record of designing and operating distributed systems serving millions of users in production
- Expert-level data modeling with NoSQL (Mongo), and good judgment on when relational or other stores fit better
- Experience designing event-driven and streaming architectures (Kafka/Confluent, queues, pub/sub)
- You've built and owned high-throughput, low-latency REST (and/or async) APIs as long-lived platforms, not one-offs
- Security-minded across authn/authz, data protection, and supply-chain risk
- Strong cloud-native chops on AWS
- AI fluency: you use agentic coding tools (Claude Code, Cursor, etc.) to multiply your output, and you help set the standards for how the team builds with AI; including designing agentic and AI-powered systems into the platform
- You set technical direction across teams and mentor engineers, leading through influence rather than authority
- You have a strong product sense and connect technical decisions to real user and business impact
- You're a doer who thrives in ambiguity and brings others along with you
- You love building and scaling, and you raise the bar for everyone around you
What the job involves
- You will set the technical direction for the backend platform that connects fans and talent to create the perfect video shoutout; and you'll make it fast, reliable, and ready for the next order of magnitude of scale
- This is a hands-on leadership role: you'll architect the core services behind our website and mobile app, own the hardest distributed-systems and data problems, and raise the engineering bar for the teams around you
- As a staff backend engineer, you'll go deep on our backend (node.js) and data layer (MongoDB), design the event-driven and API architecture that ties everything together, and partner closely with product, data, and platform teams
- You'll also help define how we build with AI; from using agentic coding tools to move faster, to designing the AI-powered systems that make Cameo better
- You won't just ship features; you'll define how we build, where we invest, and how we stay reliable as we grow
Our take
Cameo is an American video-sharing website that allows celebrities to interact with users via video. For a low price of $5 to a high fee of $3,000, customers pay Cameo for lightly scripted messages from celebrities.
They've helped create over 500,000 moments for their customers and built a marketplace for over 20,000 celebrities to connect with their biggest fans. They're breaking down the exclusivity myth of celebrity by building personal relationships between fans and talent.
Whilst Cameo has done exceptionally well over the past few years, it's now starting to wane as it fails to source A-listers for its platform, and as a result, the company has reduced the number of its staff. Off the back of the launch of Cameo Business, a lack of proper disclosure concerning endorsements led to several lawsuits filed against the company in 2024. However, the company has taken action to balance the costs with its cash reserves and refocus its goals.
Freddie
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
1% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 5 rounds)
Mar 2024
$28m
LATE VC
Mar 2021
$100m
SERIES C
Total funding: $193.7m
Company benefits
- Competitive salaries
- Equity
- Health insurance
- 401(k)
- Wellness perks
- Nlimited PTO
- Heads Down Hump Days 🐪 (aka no recurring meetings), and an annual talent show that will have you LOL-ing - just to name a few
- Oh, and did we mention Cameo works with noteworthy actors, athletes, musicians, your favorite creators, global superstars, famous furry friends and more!?
Company HQ
West Loop, Chicago, IL
Leadership
Devon Townsend
(Co-Founder & CTO)Previously Program Manager at Microsoft for 1 year and Senior Software Engineer at CollegeBand for 2 years.
Steven Galanis
(Co-Founder & CEO)Previously Options Trader at Belvedere Trading for 3 years and Broker Associate at North Clybourn Group for 2 years.
Salary benchmarks
We don't have enough data yet to provide salary benchmarks for this role.
Submit your salary to help other candidates with crowdsourced salary estimates.
Share this job
View 1 more job at Cameo