About the Opportunity

We are seeking an accomplished Senior Backend Engineer to design and build the services, APIs, data flows, and distributed systems that power business-critical digital products at scale.

This is a hands-on engineering position for someone who enjoys solving difficult backend problems where performance, reliability, data consistency, security, and architectural simplicity all matter.

Our backend environment supports increasingly sophisticated products and workloads. Services must communicate reliably across distributed architectures. APIs need to remain stable as products evolve. Data must move accurately between systems. Infrastructure must scale with unpredictable demand. New AI capabilities must integrate with existing application architecture without weakening security, observability, or reliability.

The Senior Backend Engineer will help solve those problems.

You will work across the full backend lifecycle—from technical design and data modeling through implementation, testing, deployment, production observability, incident response, and continuous optimization.

Depending on the product area, you may build high-throughput APIs, asynchronous processing systems, financial or transactional services, AI orchestration layers, workflow engines, integration platforms, real-time services, or data-intensive backend capabilities.

You will partner closely with Product, Frontend Engineering, Platform Engineering, Data, Security, SRE, and other backend engineers while retaining significant ownership over technical decisions.

We value engineers who can distinguish between architecture that is genuinely necessary and architecture that simply looks sophisticated.

The goal is not to build the most complicated system.

The goal is to build systems that remain fast, understandable, resilient, secure, and maintainable as the organization scales.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities

Backend Systems Engineering

Design, develop, test, and operate production backend services.
Build highly available and scalable application components.
Develop systems capable of handling complex business workflows.
Write clean, maintainable, production-grade code.
Improve existing services through thoughtful refactoring.
Participate in architectural and technical-design decisions.
Own services throughout their production lifecycle.

API & Service Architecture

Design robust REST, GraphQL, gRPC, or comparable service interfaces.
Establish clear API contracts.
Build internal and external integrations.
Develop appropriate authentication, authorization, validation, and rate-limiting controls.
Maintain backward compatibility where required.
Improve API performance and reliability.
Establish effective versioning and lifecycle practices.

Distributed Systems & Microservices

Build and operate distributed backend architectures.
Design services with appropriate boundaries and ownership.
Address consistency, availability, latency, and failure-handling trade-offs.
Develop resilient communication between services.
Implement idempotency and safe retry strategies.
Design graceful degradation and recovery behavior.
Diagnose difficult distributed-system failures.

Event-Driven Architecture

Build asynchronous workflows using technologies such as Kafka, RabbitMQ, Amazon SQS/SNS, Google Pub/Sub, or comparable platforms.
Design reliable event producers and consumers.
Handle retries, duplicate events, dead-letter scenarios, and ordering requirements.
Develop event-driven integrations.
Improve observability across asynchronous workflows.
Support high-throughput processing where required.

Data Architecture & Persistence

Design effective relational and non-relational data models.
Work with technologies such as PostgreSQL, MySQL, DynamoDB, MongoDB, Redis, or comparable systems.
Optimize complex queries and database access patterns.
Improve indexing and storage strategies.
Maintain transactional and data-integrity requirements.
Support schema evolution and migrations.
Evaluate trade-offs between different persistence technologies.

Performance & Scalability

Identify application and infrastructure bottlenecks.
Profile backend services under production-like workloads.
Improve latency, throughput, memory usage, and resource efficiency.
Develop caching strategies.
Optimize database interactions.
Design systems for horizontal scaling.
Conduct capacity planning for critical services.

Cloud-Native Engineering

Build backend services for AWS, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud Platform.
Work with containerized environments using Docker and Kubernetes where applicable.
Partner with Platform Engineering on deployment and infrastructure patterns.
Design services around cloud-native reliability principles.
Support autoscaling and resilient deployment architectures.
Contribute to infrastructure and deployment automation where appropriate.

Reliability & Production Engineering

Define appropriate reliability expectations for owned services.
Develop health checks, metrics, logging, tracing, and alerting.
Work with OpenTelemetry, Datadog, Grafana, Prometheus, Splunk, or comparable observability technologies.
Participate in production incident response.
Conduct root-cause analysis.
Develop permanent corrective actions following significant incidents.
Reduce operational toil through engineering and automation.

Security Engineering

Apply secure coding principles throughout backend development.
Implement robust authentication and authorization.
Protect sensitive data appropriately.
Follow encryption and secrets-management standards.
Prevent common application vulnerabilities.
Partner with Security Engineering on threat modeling and remediation.
Incorporate security into technical design rather than treating it as a final review.

AI & Intelligent Systems Integration

Build backend services supporting AI-enabled product capabilities.
Integrate applications with LLMs, model endpoints, vector databases, and AI services where appropriate.
Develop orchestration and workflow layers around AI functionality.
Implement appropriate validation, fallback, and error-handling strategies.
Monitor latency, reliability, and cost associated with AI services.
Ensure AI-enabled capabilities follow established security and data-governance requirements.

Engineering Quality

Develop comprehensive unit and integration testing.
Participate in thoughtful code reviews.
Improve CI/CD quality controls.
Develop testing strategies for complex backend workflows.
Maintain appropriate technical documentation.
Help strengthen engineering standards across the team.

Technical Leadership & Mentorship

Provide technical guidance to engineers.
Review architectural proposals.
Mentor less-experienced developers.
Help teams make appropriate engineering trade-offs.
Contribute to engineering standards and reusable patterns.
Lead technical initiatives without requiring formal people-management authority.

Job Qualifications and Requirements

7+ years of professional software-engineering experience, with substantial backend development responsibility.
Advanced proficiency in one or more backend languages such as Python, Go, Java, Kotlin, C#, Rust, or TypeScript/Node.js.
Strong understanding of data structures, algorithms, concurrency, and software-design principles.
Experience designing and operating production APIs.
Strong experience with distributed systems or microservices.
Experience with relational databases such as PostgreSQL or MySQL.
Familiarity with NoSQL and caching technologies.
Experience building cloud-native applications on AWS, Azure, or GCP.
Strong understanding of asynchronous and event-driven architectures.
Experience with automated testing and CI/CD.
Understanding of application security and secure API design.
Strong production debugging and root-cause-analysis capabilities.
Experience with modern observability practices.
Ability to communicate technical decisions clearly to engineering and non-engineering stakeholders.

Particularly Valuable Experience

High-scale SaaS platforms
FinTech or payments
AI/ML products
Developer platforms
Cybersecurity
Real-time systems
High-volume transaction processing
Kubernetes
Kafka
PostgreSQL
Redis
GraphQL or gRPC
Infrastructure as Code
OpenTelemetry
Multi-region architectures
Regulated technology environments

A degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Computer Engineering, or a related technical field is preferred but not required where equivalent engineering expertise can be demonstrated.

Personal Capabilities and Qualifications

Engineering Judgment

You know when a problem requires sophisticated architecture and when a straightforward solution is more reliable.

Systems Thinking

You understand how application code interacts with databases, networks, queues, cloud infrastructure, and downstream services.

Production Ownership

You consider deployment and production behavior part of software engineering—not someone else’s responsibility.

Technical Curiosity

You investigate why systems behave the way they do rather than accepting unexplained performance or reliability problems.

Security Awareness

You naturally consider permissions, data exposure, abuse scenarios, and failure modes while designing services.

Pragmatism

You balance technical excellence with delivery requirements and long-term maintainability.

Communication

You can explain architecture and engineering trade-offs clearly to technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Collaborative Leadership

You improve the engineering organization through code reviews, mentorship, design discussions, and strong technical examples.

Strategic Support

The Senior Backend Engineer may contribute to broader technology initiatives including:

Platform modernization
Microservices architecture
Cloud migration
AI product development
API strategy
Event-driven architecture
Data-platform integration
Application modernization
Developer productivity
Production reliability
Security modernization
Performance engineering
Technical debt reduction
Enterprise integrations
Engineering standards

Senior engineers may also participate in architecture reviews and technical planning for initiatives that affect multiple product or engineering teams.

Working Conditions

Remote or flexible working arrangements may be available depending on organizational requirements.
Regular collaboration with distributed Backend, Frontend, Product, Platform, Security, Data, and SRE teams.
Participation in an engineering on-call rotation may be required.
Occasional additional availability may be necessary for critical incidents or major production releases.
Work is primarily performed in a professional software-engineering environment.
The position requires appropriate handling of confidential customer, application, security, and technical information.
Engineers are expected to maintain appropriate production change and security practices.

Job Function

Primary Function: Backend Software Engineering

Core Areas:

Compensation & Benefits

The anticipated compensation range for this position is:

$235,000 – $256,000 annually

Final compensation will consider backend engineering depth, production scale, distributed-systems expertise, technical leadership, cloud experience, geographic considerations, and overall qualifications.

The broader total rewards package may include:

Annual performance incentives
Equity or long-term incentives where applicable
Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage
Retirement savings with employer contributions
Generous paid time off and company holidays
Remote and flexible work arrangements
Engineering conference and professional-development support
Technical certification opportunities
Home-office and engineering equipment
Wellness and family-support programs

Why Join Us

The backend is where many of the hardest product problems eventually meet.

A customer action becomes an API request. That request crosses services, databases, queues, infrastructure, security boundaries, and external integrations before the customer ever sees the result.

As systems grow, seemingly simple decisions about service boundaries, data models, retries, caching, concurrency, and observability can determine whether a platform remains elegant—or becomes increasingly difficult to operate.

This role gives you meaningful ownership of those decisions.

You will have room to improve architecture, build new services, modernize legacy components, strengthen production reliability, introduce better engineering patterns, and help integrate emerging AI capabilities into real products.

You will work across:

API Design → Distributed Systems → Data → Cloud → Reliability → Security → Scale

For a backend engineer who wants difficult technical problems, meaningful production ownership, and the opportunity to influence how a sophisticated software platform evolves, this role offers substantial engineering depth without requiring you to leave hands-on development behind.

Senior Backend Engineer