Senior Backend Engineer

Duties/Responsibilities

• Drive delivery of large backend features end-to-end — breaking large projects into manageable plans, estimating work with moderate unknowns accurately, and raising risks early
• Lead technical design for complex features; evaluate trade-offs across performance, maintainability, and cost; document decisions; design for extensibility
• Own a significant area of the product or a full service — accountable for its reliability, performance, and evolution
• Build and operate Python services, APIs, and data models (MongoDB) deployed on Kubernetes across GCP and Azure
• Debug and resolve medium-to-large production issues; quickly identify root cause and drive fast response and recovery
• Drive monitoring, observability, and performance health in your product area
• Review code and technical designs with constructive, specific feedback; mentor junior and mid-level engineers, including on how to produce higher-quality designs
• Partner with product on medium-to-large features — contributing real feedback and helping shape product decisions in your domain
• Write clear technical documents; communicate complex technical topics to non-technical stakeholders and facilitate productive technical discussions
• Proactively unblock yourself and others; make pragmatic trade-offs between speed and quality
• Help shape team culture and engineering practices in your area of expertise.

Required Qualifications

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience building and operating production backend systems
• Deep expertise in multiple areas of a backend stack: a primary server-side language (Python preferred), API design, data modeling, and automated testing
• Demonstrated track record of delivering large features end-to-end, on plans you built yourself, with moderate unknowns
• Experience owning a service or major product area in production — including its reliability and performance, not just its features
• Strong debugging and troubleshooting skills on medium-to-large issues; comfortable participating in on-call for what you own
• Working knowledge of infrastructure, security, and observability, plus CI/CD and deployment practices
• Experience mentoring junior and mid-level engineers and giving high-quality code review feedback
• Strong written and verbal communication — able to produce clear medium-to-large technical documents and explain trade-offs to non-technical stakeholders
• Openness to utilizing and becoming an expert in AI-assisted development to supercharge your ability to get stuff done.

Nice to Have Experience

About the Gravitate Team