Senior Backend Engineer, Core APIs (SRE Focus)

Role Overview

Accountabilities

• Design, develop, and optimize backend services for real-time data processing and web APIs.
• Define and own SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets for core API services.
• Build observability with metrics, structured logging, distributed tracing, dashboards, and alerts.
• Participate in on-call rotations, respond to incidents, mitigate customer impact, and lead blameless reviews.
• Automate operational processes and complete incident action items to reduce toil and recurring failures.
• Conduct capacity planning, load testing, performance analysis, and tuning.
• Investigate production and product issues and translate findings into engineering improvements.
• Integrate backend components with other services and collaborate across teams.
• Improve engineering and operational processes and contribute to a reliability-focused culture.
• Mentor engineers and support technical and operational growth.

Required Experience

• At least five years of backend software engineering experience, including operating production systems the candidate helped build.
• Experience with formal SRE practices, including error budgets, capacity planning, production readiness reviews, or resilience testing.
• Strong hands-on experience with Go and/or Node.js and willingness to learn the other technology.
• Experience designing and maintaining scalable backend systems, APIs, microservices, and real-time data services.
• Experience running production workloads with Docker and Kubernetes or comparable technologies.
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code tools such as Terraform or AWS CloudFormation.
• Working knowledge of observability platforms such as Datadog and related instrumentation and alerting practices.
• Experience with production on-call rotations, incident troubleshooting, mitigation, and post-incident analysis.
• Strong SQL skills and experience with databases or data stores such as DynamoDB, Redis, or Elasticsearch.
• Familiarity with Git, shell scripting, IDEs, CI/CD pipelines, and standard software engineering practices.
• Excellent English communication and effective collaboration in a globally distributed remote-first environment.

Technical Scope

• The role requires strong understanding of distributed systems, scalability, reliability, and performance engineering.
• Analytical platforms such as ClickHouse, Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, or Databricks are advantageous.
• Performance profiling and cost optimization for high-throughput cloud workloads are a plus.
• Experience with large open-source projects and asynchronous international collaboration is beneficial.
• Experience with both Node.js and Go, internet security, and privacy mechanisms is highly valued.

Workplace

• The team is fully remote and globally distributed.
• The work environment supports asynchronous communication and remote collaboration.
• Employees must be authorized to work from their home location; visa sponsorship is not provided.
• Country-specific employment requirements and compensation structures may apply outside the United States.

Compensation Reference

• The US compensation reference is $150,000-$200,000 in cash compensation for US-based employees.
• Compensation ranges vary according to hiring location.