Senior Software Engineer - Backend Systems

Role Overview

Senior Software Engineer, Backend Systems reporting to the Head of Engineering. You will be deeply hands-on, drive architectural decisions, ship durable backend systems, and mentor engineers.

Responsibilities

• Backend engineering: Design, build, and own critical backend services such as APIs, data pipelines, async workers, and supporting infrastructure.
• Architecture & reliability: Make sound architectural trade-offs, document decisions (ADRs), and drive platform/reliability investments alongside feature work.
• Operational excellence: Establish and uphold standards for code quality, test coverage, and operational practices.
• Performance & scalability: Diagnose and resolve complex performance, reliability, and scalability issues; run thorough post-mortems to prevent recurrence.
• Distributed systems: Build resilient distributed systems using patterns like circuit breakers, retries, idempotency, and rate limiting.
• Service lifecycle & deployment: Own services from design through deployment, including CI/CD, containerization (Docker/Kubernetes), and cloud infrastructure.
• Observability: Implement/iterate on structured logging, metrics dashboards, distributed tracing, and alerting.
• Infrastructure as Code & cost: Contribute to Terraform/Pulumi practices and cloud cost optimization.
• Data & integrations: Design performant, well-normalized data models across relational and non-relational stores; build ETL/ELT workflows and third-party/external API integrations.
• Caching & async architecture: Apply caching strategies (CDN/in-memory/app-level) and build decoupled architectures using message queues/event streaming.
• Security & compliance: Secure-by-default practices (input validation, secrets management, least privilege, vulnerability protections) and support compliance efforts (e.g., SOC 2, GDPR).
• Technical leadership: Unblock teams, lead quality design reviews, mentor engineers, and collaborate with Product and Design to scope work realistically.

Requirements

• 8+ years of software engineering experience with deep backend expertise (APIs, databases, distributed architectures).