Senior Back End Engineer

About the role

This role is on Zello's backend services team. The team that owns and operates the distributed systems carrying every conversation our customers depend on. You'll join as the third engineer on a high-ownership team, taking full production responsibility for our most critical services from day one.

What You'll Do

• Operate as a senior individual contributor on the backend services team, owning production for distributed systems at real-time scale.
• Carry the on-call rotation for Zello's most critical infrastructure. Lead incident response, write runbooks, and turn each incident into a durable improvement.
• Build observability where it's missing. Set SLOs, instrument services with Grafana and Loki, and shift team posture from reactive to proactive.
• Ship production C++ today; contribute to Rust and Go components as they come online.
• Work hands-on across our database stack: Cassandra, MongoDB, MySQL and choose the right tool for the workload.
• Contribute to backend 2.0: a ground-up modernization of the platform anchored on AI-native engineering workflows (AGENTS.md, CLAUDE.md, .cursor/rules).

Who You Are

• You've carried real production weight on distributed systems at scale, and you talk about reliability as something you own, not something you measure.
• You've shipped C++ in production for years and read long-lived backend codebases without flinching. Rust or Go in your toolkit is a plus.
• You've gone deep on at least one of Cassandra, MongoDB, or MySQL, and can name the tradeoffs because you've felt them in production.
• You use AI-assisted development as a default and have shaped CLAUDE.md, AGENTS.md, .cursor/rules, or equivalent for a real team.
• You thrive on a small team where every hire moves the needle. You drop ego in code review. You take scope, you don't wait for it.
• Your definition of "done" includes tests, alerts, observability, and runbooks.

Pay

Competitive pay with significant upside.

Schedule

Flexible schedules and time off encouraged.

Benefits

• Intentionally designed benefits to encourage healthy and well-balanced employees.
• Sabbatical after every five years of service.

Qualifications

No specific qualifications listed beyond those implied by the responsibilities and experience described.