Backend Software Engineer
About the role
ClearlyRated is a B2B SaaS platform that helps professional services firms measure, understand, and act on client satisfaction data. We are building the backend platform that powers survey automation and relationship intelligence for some of the world's largest professional services firms.
Key Responsibilities
- System, Database and API design as a first-class skill.
- Event-driven microservices on GCP Pub/Sub: async processing, backpressure handling, dead-letter queues, the full picture.
- Webhook-triggered survey automation engine.
- Resilient, observable services: retries, timeouts, circuit breakers, structured logging, metrics, and tracing baked into how we build.
- Security and SSO integration for enterprise clients with complex credential and access models.
- Permission and access control systems that reflect matrix organizational hierarchies.
- An integration layer that connects enterprise data sources to our platform through well-designed service interfaces.
Skills, Knowledge and Expertise
- Java 18+
- Spring Boot / Spring ecosystem depth
- SQL and data modelling confidence
- API design instincts
- Systems thinking under failure
- .NET / C# experience is a genuine plus
- GCP experience: Pub/Sub, Dataflow, BigQuery, Vertex AI
- Kafka or other message queue experience: consumer groups, offset management, partition strategy
- Kubernetes and container orchestration
- Event sourcing or CQRS patterns
- Experience with observability tooling — distributed tracing, structured logging, alerting on the things that matter
How we Hire
We hire on ability, not tenure. We don't care whether your experience comes from a top university, a bootcamp, an open-source project, or a side hustle you built at 2am. What we care about is whether you can think clearly, build well, and learn fast. Our interview process is deliberately hard. If you make it through, you'll know you earned it, and so will we. We test fundamentals, systems thinking, and the ability to reason through problems you haven't seen before. We don't ask you to recite design patterns. We ask you to think.