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 ar