Sr Backend Engineer

Purpose
DeepRunner AI is building AI-native business automation for the enterprise. We are looking for a Senior Backend Engineer to design, build, deploy, and operate backend systems that power our platform. You will own services end-to-end from architecture through production reliability and work in a flat, high-autonomy environment where engineering excellence is the expectation.

Role Overview
As a Senior Backend Engineer, you will build and scale backend microservices that serve a growing number of enterprise customers and endpoints. You will design APIs, implement event-driven architectures, manage data pipelines, and take production ownership of the systems you build. This is a hands-on individual contributor role with meaningful SRE responsibilities — you build it, you run it.

What You Will Do
• Design, develop, and operate backend microservices in Java, Kotlin, or equivalent JVM-based languages
• Build and maintain RESTful and gRPC APIs that are performant, secure, and well-documented
• Architect event-driven systems using message brokers such as Kafka, RabbitMQ, or SQS for reliable asynchronous processing
• Design and optimize data stores, including schema design, query optimization, indexing, and replication strategies
• Containerize services with Docker and orchestrate deployments on Kubernetes or equivalent platforms
• Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines for automated testing, deployment, and rollback
• Own production reliability: monitoring, alerting, incident response, post-mortems, and capacity planning
• Implement multi-tenant architectures with strong isolation, security, and performance characteristics
• Integrate with third-party APIs and external systems, building resilient connectors with retry, circuit-breaking, and graceful degradation patterns
• Collaborate with product and engineering peers to translate requirements into scalable technical solutions

Qualifications Required
• 5+ years of professional experience building and operating backend systems in production environments
• Strong proficiency in Java, Kotlin, or a comparable statically-typed language
• Deep experience with containerization (Docker) and orchestration (Kubernetes, ECS, or equivalent)
• Hands-on experience with at least one major cloud platform, with preference for AWS (EC2, ECS/EKS, RDS, SQS, Lambda, S3, CloudWatch)
• Solid understanding of relational databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL) and NoSQL stores (Redis, DynamoDB, MongoDB), including ORM frameworks and their trade-offs
• Experience designing and consuming message-driven architectures (Kafka, RabbitMQ, SQS/SNS)
• Track record of building systems that scaled to a large number of concurrent users or endpoints
• Experience with CI/CD tooling (GitHub Actions, Jenkins) and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, CloudFormation, or Pulumi)
• Production ownership mindset: you have been on-call, triaged incidents, written post-mortems, and improved system reliability as a result
• Strong API design skills (REST, gRPC) with attention to versioning, error handling, and documentation

Preferred
• Experience with observability stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, ELK, or OpenTelemetry)
• Experience building multi-tenant SaaS platforms with tenant isolation and data partitioning
• Contributions to open-source projects
• Familiarity with AI-assisted development tools and workflows
• Comfortable working across the stack when the situation calls for it
• Experience working with distributed, international engineering teams

What We Value
• Ownership — you build it, you run it, you improve it
• Bias for Action — you ship, learn, and iterate quickly
• Raise the Bar — you push yourself and your peers toward engineering excellence
• Backbone — you speak up when something is wrong, even when it is uncomfortable
• Trust — you earn trust through consistency, transparency, and results