Backend Engineer (Java, API)

Role Overview

Backend Engineer focused on building scalable backend services and APIs for Slang AI’s conversational voice products for restaurants.

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and maintain scalable backend services primarily in the Kotlin/JVM ecosystem
• Create and optimize GraphQL APIs for internal and external clients
• Build integrations with:
  • Twilio (telephony)
  • Dialogflow (conversational AI flows)
• Create and maintain Firestore data models optimized for performance, cost, and maintainability
• Implement observability (logging, metrics, tracing, alerting)
• Write automated tests (unit, integration, end-to-end)
• Participate in code reviews and collaborate with product managers, conversation designers, and engineers
• Document systems and help drive continuous improvement
• Contribute to occasional frontend components in React/TypeScript as needed

Qualifications

• 3–5 years of professional software development, primarily backend
• Strong proficiency with JVM languages, especially Kotlin (also Java/Scala)
• Solid understanding of functional programming concepts
• Experience building and consuming RESTful or GraphQL APIs
• Familiarity with NoSQL and data modeling (specifically Firestore preferred)
• Experience with Docker
• Hands-on experience with cloud platforms: GCP, AWS, or Azure
• Strong testing knowledge, including TDD and automated testing
• Excellent debugging and problem-solving skills
• Basic familiarity with React and TypeScript
• Ability to work independently and manage time in remote or hybrid settings
• Effective written and verbal communication

Nice to Have / Growth

• Participate in on-call rotations approximately every two months
• Mentoring junior engineers via code reviews and pair programming