Backend Engineer

About the role

The Backend Engineer role builds the APIs, services, and data-intensive systems that power user-facing products used at scale. The work spans service design, distributed systems, asynchronous workflows, and integrations across a modern cloud platform. The role owns backend features from technical design through production operation, partnering with frontend, mobile, product, and infrastructure engineers to deliver reliable experiences. Austin-based team members collaborate remotely across time zones with a strong emphasis on clear documentation, pragmatic architecture, and measurable system performance.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement production services and REST or GraphQL APIs using Go, Java, Python, or equivalent backend technologies
• Build reliable data workflows with PostgreSQL, Redis, Kafka, or similar systems, including schema design, migration strategies, caching, and event processing
• Deploy and operate services on AWS using Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, and automated CI/CD pipelines
• Improve system performance, availability, and observability through profiling, load testing, structured logging, metrics, and distributed tracing
• Define service contracts, failure-handling strategies, and security controls for integrations with internal and third-party systems
• Write comprehensive unit, integration, and end-to-end tests; participate in design reviews, code reviews, incident response, and post-incident improvements

Requirements

• 3–8 years of professional software engineering experience, with a strong focus on backend or platform development
• Proficiency in at least one backend language such as Go, Java, Python, Kotlin, or C++, with a track record of shipping production services
• Hands-on experience designing APIs, distributed systems, background jobs, and event-driven architectures
• Strong knowledge of relational databases, SQL, data modeling, and performance tuning; experience with PostgreSQL is preferred
• Practical experience with cloud infrastructure and production operations, including AWS, containers, Kubernetes, CI/CD, and observability tooling
• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent professional experience
• Bonus: Experience with Kafka, gRPC, GraphQL, Terraform, service meshes, high-throughput systems, or security and compliance requirements