Senior Backend Engineer
Designs and evolves high-scale backend capabilities, making architectural trade-offs, improving reliability and performance, and mentoring engineers. The role requires strong backend and systems expertise plus production experience building reliable agentic AI systems.
About the job
Responsibilities
- Design and ship moderate to complex backend features with minimal guidance.
- Make pragmatic architectural choices between modular-monolith code, shared components, and independently operated services.
- Advocate for product quality, security, availability, performance, maintainability, testing, APIs, and operational readiness.
- Mentor associate and intermediate engineers, remove technical blockers, and improve delivery practices through code and design reviews.
- Diagnose and prevent performance and reliability issues at scale.
- Participate in incident response and act as a technical owner when appropriate.
- Use AI in production engineering work, evaluate its effectiveness, and coach others on responsible use.
- Collaborate across product, frontend, infrastructure, data, and security boundaries.
Requirements
- Strong command of backend architecture, APIs, data systems, and performance tuning in complex product or service environments.
- Proficiency in modern backend languages and a deep understanding of systems programming.
- Experience designing or evolving modular backend boundaries, bounded contexts, and migration-safe architectures.
- Ability to lead through influence, technical judgment, and clear written communication.
- Proven experience building or operating agentic systems in production, including loops, tool use, and error-handling strategies.
Nice-to-haves
- Experience with high-throughput distributed systems, concurrency, or profiling.
- Hands-on experience with containerized production operations.
- Database performance expertise, including schema evolution and partitioning.
- Background in large-scale modular monoliths or event-driven systems.
- Public technical communication, open-source maintenance, or experience with developer-focused SaaS.
Compensation and Benefits
- Base salary: $139,200–$235,200 USD for United States residents.
- Benefits include flexible paid time off, team member resource groups, equity compensation, an employee stock purchase plan, a growth and development fund, and parental leave.
Skills
Backend Architecture, APIs, Systems Programming, Distributed Systems, Concurrency, Profiling, Kubernetes, Postgres, ClickHouse, Event-Driven Systems, Modular Monoliths, Agentic AI, Performance Tuning, Incident Response
Similar jobs
Backend Engineering jobs
GitLab
United StatesSenior Software Engineer responsible for evolving GitLab’s authorization model across its Ruby on Rails monolith and next-generation policy engine. The role requires production Rails experience, authorization expertise, security judgment, API knowledge, and strong written communication.
GitLab
Canada
Senior backend engineer building authentication and identity services across GitLab’s Rails monolith and GATE. The role requires professional Go or Ruby experience, authentication and authorization expertise, and the ability to solve complex security and scalability problems in a remote environment.
GitLab
Canada
Builds and evolves scalable backend capabilities for GitLab’s portfolio planning and work items platform, partnering with product and users while mentoring engineers. Requires senior full-stack experience with a backend focus, Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL performance optimization, API design, and automated testing.
Fivetran
Oakland, CABuild and scale backend services for the dbt metadata platform, including discovery, catalog, lineage, and run history. The role requires 5+ years of software engineering experience, distributed systems expertise, strong backend development skills, and hands-on cloud and containerization experience.
ZoomInfo
Bethesda, MD
Build and scale high-performance backend services and microservices for a platform serving millions of users. The role requires strong Node.js expertise, distributed-systems experience, and technical leadership, with Java, cloud, and AI-assisted development experience preferred.