Senior Software Engineer - Backend & Distributed Systems

We are looking for a Senior Software Engineer with 6–10 years of professional experience building scalable backend systems, APIs, distributed services, and cloud-native applications.

You will primarily work with Go and Python, building reliable services that process large volumes of data and support production applications. You will also work extensively with PostgreSQL and SQL, containerized infrastructure, Kubernetes, and AWS or GCP.

This is a software engineering position rather than a research-focused machine learning role. Experience integrating AI/ML or LLM capabilities into production applications is valuable, but AI/ML is not the primary focus of this position.

RESPONSIBILITIES

• Design, build, and maintain production backend services using Go and Python.
• Develop scalable REST and gRPC APIs.
• Build microservices and distributed systems supporting high-throughput production workloads.
• Design concurrent applications using goroutines, channels, synchronization primitives, and context management.
• Develop asynchronous workers and event-driven processing systems.
• Design resilient services using retries, timeouts, circuit breakers, idempotency, caching, and graceful failure handling.
• Build Python APIs and internal services using FastAPI.
• Integrate internal services, third-party APIs, databases, messaging platforms, and cloud services.
• Design and maintain relational data models using PostgreSQL.
• Write advanced SQL queries using joins, CTEs, aggregations, and window functions.
• Optimize PostgreSQL performance using indexing, query plans, partitioning, and connection management.
• Work with transactions, locking, isolation levels, JSONB, and database migrations.
• Build event-driven architectures using Kafka or similar messaging technologies.
• Implement caching and distributed state management using Redis.
• Containerize applications using Docker.
• Deploy and operate production workloads using Kubernetes.
• Design and maintain cloud infrastructure on AWS and/or GCP.
• Manage infrastructure using Terraform and Infrastructure as Code (IaC).
• Build automated CI/CD workflows using GitHub Actions.
• Implement automated unit, integration, API, and end-to-end testing.
• Establish application observability through logging, metrics, distributed tracing, dashboards, and alerting.
• Troubleshoot complex production incidents across application, database, network, and infrastructure layers.
• Participate in architecture reviews and technical design discussions.
• Conduct code reviews and establish backend engineering standards.
• Mentor junior and mid-level engineers.
• Collaborate with frontend engineers, platform engineers, data engineers, product managers, and other technical teams.

REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS

• 6–10 years of professional software engineering experience.
• Strong professional experience with Go (Golang).
• Strong professional experience with Python.
• Advanced knowledge of SQL.
• Strong production experience with PostgreSQL.
• Experience designing REST APIs and/or gRPC services.
• Strong understanding of microservice architectures.
• Experience designing distributed and concurrent systems.
• Strong understanding of Go concurrency, including goroutines, channels, mutexes, contexts, and synchronization.
• Experience building production Python services using FastAPI or similar frameworks.
• Experience with event-driven and asynchronous processing.
• Experience with Docker and containerized applications.
• Production experience with Kubernetes.
• Experience with AWS and/or GCP.
• Experience with Terraform or another Infrastructure as Code technology.
• Experience implementing CI/CD pipelines.
• Strong understanding of automated testing.
• Knowledge of application security, authentication, authorization, and API security.
• Strong understanding of scalability, availability, reliability, and fault tolerance.
• Strong debugging and production troubleshooting skills.

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS

• Experience with Kafka or similar event-streaming technologies.
• Experience with Redis.
• Experience with Protocol Buffers and gRPC.
• Experience building high-throughput or low-latency systems.
• Experience with PostgreSQL JSONB and advanced indexing.
• Experience with distributed tracing and observability platforms.
• Experience with Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, or OpenTelemetry.
• Experience designing multi-tenant SaaS platforms.
• Experience with Kubernetes autoscaling and production cluster operations.
• Experience with AWS services such as EKS, ECS, RDS, S3, SQS, SNS, Lambda, and CloudWatch.
• Experience with comparable GCP services.
• Familiarity with machine learning and generative AI systems.
• Experience integrating LLM APIs or machine learning services into production applications.
• Familiarity with vector search and PostgreSQL pgvector.

TECHNOLOGY STACK

Languages:
Go, Python, SQL

Backend:
Go, FastAPI, REST, gRPC, Protocol Buffers, Microservices

Data:
PostgreSQL, Redis, Kafka, JSONB, pgvector

Cloud & DevOps:
AWS and/or GCP, Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, GitHub Actions

Observability:
OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog

Optional AI/ML:
PyTorch, Hugging Face, LLM APIs, RAG, LangChain/LangGraph, Vector Search

SENIOR-LEVEL EXPECTATIONS

As a Senior Software Engineer, you will be expected to own major backend systems rather than only implement individual tickets.

You should be comfortable taking a service from initial architecture through implementation, testing, deployment, monitoring, and production operation.

You will make technical decisions involving API design, database architecture, distributed systems, concurrency, performance, reliability, security, and cloud infrastructure.

You will also help establish engineering standards, review technical designs, mentor other engineers, and drive improvements across the engineering organization.