# Senior Software Engineer, Backend
**Company:** [Perpay](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/perpay)
**Location:** Philadelphia, PA
**Salary:** $160K-$200K
**Experience:** 5+ years
**Skills:** Python, Django, Rails, Postgres, AWS, Docker, Kubernetes, Celery, Redis, Datadog, CloudWatch
**Posted:** 2026-04-23
> Designs and evolves RESTful APIs, owns relational data modeling, improves backend reliability and observability. Requires 5+ years building scalable web apps, deep relational DB expertise, cloud ops experience, and leadership on complex projects.
## Job Description
## Responsibilities
- Design and evolve RESTful APIs used by our frontend and internal systems
- Own data modeling decisions across our relational databases with an eye toward performance and maintainability
- Improve reliability, observability, and operational excellence of our backend systems (metrics, logging, tracing, alerting)
- Participate in architectural decisions around service boundaries, asynchronous workflows, and distributed system tradeoffs
- Diagnose and resolve production issues across multiple services
- Contribute to infrastructure-as-code and CI/CD improvements to increase developer velocity and system stability
- Partner with product and stakeholders to translate complex business rules into maintainable backend systems

## What You’ll Bring
- 5+ years of experience building web applications at scale in at least one modern language / framework (e.g. Python/Django, Rails, etc.)
- 2+ years of experience leading technical teams and large, complex projects
- Deep understanding of relational databases (e.g., Postgres), query optimization, indexing strategies, and schema evolution
- Experience operating production systems in a large cloud provider (e.g. AWS)
- Familiarity with containerized environments (Docker) and orchestration systems (Kubernetes)
- Experience with background job systems and message queues (e.g. Celery)
- Working knowledge of caching strategies (e.g. Redis)
- Experience with monitoring/observability tooling (e.g. Datadog, CloudWatch)
- Strong understanding of system reliability, failure modes, and operational tradeoffs
- Ability to communicate complex system behavior clearly to non-technical stakeholders
- A solutions-oriented mindset, willing to step outside your primary domain to unblock teammates and ensure successful delivery

## Compensation
- NYC-level total cash-comp (base $160k into the $200’s, plus equity and a discretionary cash bonus)
**Apply:** https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/senior-software-engineer-backend-at-perpay-8a829d11-4746-4469-8ac4-0beccc1c8407
**Canonical:** https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/senior-software-engineer-backend-at-perpay-8a829d11-4746-4469-8ac4-0beccc1c8407