Backend Software Engineer

Application Deadline: 26 September 2026 • Department: Engineering • Location: Portland, Oregon (Remote, 1 office day/month)

About the role

We're building the backend platform that powers survey automation and relationship intelligence for some of the world's largest professional services firms. ClearlyRated is a B2B SaaS platform that helps professional services firms, from global engineering consultancies to staffing agencies, measure, understand, and act on client satisfaction data. Our NPS-driven platform processes millions of survey interactions, powers real-time relationship health scoring, and is in the middle of a significant platform evolution toward event-driven survey automation and a modern, service-oriented backend built on Google Cloud. We're a small, focused engineering team building systems that operate at enterprise scale.

Responsibilities

• System, Database and API design as a first‑class skill: design service boundaries, data models, and REST API contracts (consumed by frontend, enterprise integrations, and third‑party clients) that must be correct, versioned, backward compatible, idempotent, with clean error contracts.
• Event‑driven microservices on GCP Pub/Sub: async processing, backpressure handling, dead‑letter queues.
• Webhook‑triggered survey automation engine: translate business events into reliable, auditable survey sends.
• Resilient, observable services: retries, timeouts, circuit breakers, structured logging, metrics, tracing.
• Security and SSO integration for enterprise clients with complex credential and access models.
• Permission and access control systems reflecting matrix organizational hierarchies.
• Integration layer connecting enterprise data sources to the platform via well‑designed service interfaces.

Skills

• Java 18+ with deep JVM understanding: concurrency, memory model, garbage collection, exception hierarchy.
• Spring Boot / Spring ecosystem depth or equivalent DI/IoC understanding.
• SQL and data modelling confidence: writes queries with joins, aggregations, window functions; understands indexes and N+1 problems.
• API design instincts: versioning, error semantics, idempotency.
• Systems thinking under failure: retries, timeouts, idempotency, consistency.
• Experience building systems that handle real load with correctness and reliability constraints.
• Bonus: GCP experience (Pub/Sub, Dataflow, BigQuery, Vertex AI), Kafka or other message queues, Kubernetes, event sourcing/CQRS, observability tooling (distributed tracing, structured logging, alerting).

Qualifications

We hire on ability, not tenure. We value clear thinking, strong building skills, and fast learning regardless of whether experience comes from a top university, bootcamp, open‑source project, or side hustle. Our interview process tests fundamentals, systems thinking, and ability to reason through unseen problems; we discuss trade‑offs, not just correct answers. .NET/C# candidates are evaluated on transferable depth, not language syntax.

Pay

$90,000 - $120,000 per year

Schedule

Remote role with 1 office day per month (no exception).