Backend Software Engineer (Golang) | Distributed Systems

W2 contract role based in Denver, CO (hybrid). Pay rate: $60 - $70 per hour.

About the Role

We are seeking a Backend Software Engineer to build, evolve, and migrate distributed backend services supporting cloud and access-control platforms. This role is software-engineering focused, with an expectation that candidates are comfortable working in cloud-native production environments.

Responsibilities

• Design, implement, test, and maintain production backend services and microservices in Golang.
• Contribute to service migration and consolidation efforts across the cloud and related access-control platforms.
• Build and evolve APIs using technologies such as gRPC, REST, and JSON-based interfaces.
• Work with distributed-system patterns including service dependencies, retries, timeouts, concurrency, state, and failure recovery.
• Integrate and operate backend services with managed or self-hosted data platforms such as PostgreSQL-compatible databases, CockroachDB, MongoDB, Cassandra, Redis, or comparable technologies.
• Containerize services and deploy them into Kubernetes-based production environments.
• Collaborate with platform and infrastructure engineers on cloud deployment, configuration, data migration, observability, and production readiness.
• Improve service performance, scalability, availability, and fault tolerance.
• Develop automated tests and participate in code review, CI/CD, release, and production validation processes.
• Use metrics, dashboards, and logs to troubleshoot service behavior and production incidents.
• Make architectural and implementation changes needed to support new cloud environments or platform integrations.
• Work independently while communicating technical tradeoffs and risks clearly to engineering partners.

Requirements

• Strong current backend software engineering experience in Go or Java.
• Experience designing and maintaining production APIs and distributed services.
• Strong understanding of data structures, concurrency, error handling, testing, and maintainable software design.
• Experience with gRPC, REST, JSON APIs, or similar service communication patterns.
• Experience with relational or distributed data stores such as PostgreSQL, CockroachDB, MongoDB, Cassandra, Redis, or similar technologies.
• Experience with Docker and Kubernetes in a development or production environment.
• Experience with Git-based development, code review, CI/CD, and production release workflows.
• Understanding of observability using metrics and logs, including tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, Splunk, or equivalents.
• Experience troubleshooting production systems across service, runtime, data, and infrastructure boundaries.
• Ability to operate independently, learn unfamiliar systems, and contribute to architecture as well as implementation.

Preferred Qualifications

• Five or more years of recent Go experience for Go-aligned teams.
• Strong Java experience for cloud service work.
• Experience with OAuth2, OIDC, identity, authorization, or access-control systems.
• Experience with high-throughput or low-latency distributed systems.
• Experience with cloud migration or adapting an existing service to a new public cloud environment.
• Experience with Kafka, NATS, Redis, or other messaging and caching technologies.
• Experience with managed cloud databases and data migration.
• Experience with Kubernetes operational troubleshooting in addition to application deployment.
• Experience designing major architectural changes without service interruption.