Staff Back-end Engineer

Qualifications

• Fluency in English, both spoken and written.
• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience, with substantial experience building and operating backend systems in production.
• Deep production-level proficiency in at least two of the following languages or ecosystems:

• Ruby
• JavaScript / TypeScript with Node.js
• Java with Spring Framework
• Python

• Strong experience designing, developing, and maintaining APIs and backend services.
• Strong knowledge of relational database design and operation, particularly MySQL and/or PostgreSQL.
• Experience analyzing and optimizing database queries, indexes, transactions, and data models.
• Production experience with Redis and RabbitMQ or comparable caching, messaging, or asynchronous processing technologies.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems concepts, including concurrency, failure handling, retries, idempotency, consistency, and asynchronous processing.
• Experience designing and maintaining systems that integrate multiple services, APIs, databases, and external dependencies.
• Experience building, maintaining, and troubleshooting CI/CD pipelines, including GitHub Actions or equivalent tooling.
• Production experience with AWS services and cloud-based architectures.
• Strong working knowledge of Linux environments, including experience troubleshooting applications and infrastructure at the operating-system level.
• Experience working with legacy systems and modern service-oriented or microservice architectures.
• Strong understanding of software testing strategies, including unit, integration, and automated testing.
• Demonstrated experience troubleshooting complex production issues across application, database, infrastructure, and network boundaries.
• Proven ability to independently own complex technical problems from investigation through production resolution.
• Ability to evaluate technical trade-offs and make pragmatic architectural decisions based on business and engineering constraints.
• Experience reviewing technical designs and providing guidance to other engineers.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to explain complex technical concepts clearly.
• Experience working effectively in distributed or remote engineering teams across multiple time zones.
• Reliable high-speed internet connection suitable for full-time remote work.
• Availability to support occasional after-hours production issues when required.

What you'll do

Backend Architecture & Technical Leadership

• Design and evolve backend services, APIs, data models, integrations, and distributed systems.
• Lead technical design for complex initiatives and evaluate architectural alternatives.
• Communicate trade-offs around scalability, reliability, performance, security, and maintainability.
• Identify opportunities to simplify systems, reduce technical debt, and modernize existing architecture.

Software Development & Delivery

• Design, implement, test, review, and deploy production-quality backend software.
• Own complex features and services from technical analysis through deployment and production operation.
• Make pragmatic decisions when working with legacy systems.
• Balance delivery speed, maintainability, and technical risk.

Distributed Systems & Reliability

• Work with relational databases, caching, queues, asynchronous processing, APIs, and service integrations.
• Apply sound judgment around transactions, concurrency, retries, idempotency, failure handling, and data consistency.
• Identify bottlenecks and improve application, database, and system performance.

Operational & Infrastructure Ownership

• Take ownership of the operational health of production systems.
• Improve monitoring, logging, metrics, alerting, CI/CD, and observability.
• Participate in incident response, root cause analysis, and remediation.
• Work comfortably with AWS, hybrid infrastructure, Linux, and on-premise environments.

Technical Leadership & Collaboration

• Provide technical guidance through architecture discussions, code reviews, debugging, documentation, and mentoring.
• Partner with Engineering, Product, Operations, and QA to translate requirements into reliable technical solutions.
• Communicate technical decisions, risks, dependencies, and trade-offs clearly across distributed teams.

Nice to have

• Experience designing high-availability or mission-critical systems.
• Experience with real-time communications, telecommunications, VoIP, WebRTC, SIP, or related technologies.
• Experience operating systems with significant production traffic or strict availability requirements.
• Experience with containerized applications and Docker.
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code or cloud automation.
• Experience designing observability strategies using metrics, logs, tracing, and alerting.
• Experience decomposing or modernizing legacy monolithic systems.
• Experience mentoring engineers or acting as a technical lead on complex projects.