Senior Backend Engineer

About the role

HackerRank helps companies like NVIDIA, Amazon, and Microsoft hire and upskill the next generation of developers based on skills, not pedigree. Our platform is trusted by over 2,500 of the world’s most innovative companies to build strong engineering teams ready for what’s next. We give companies better ways to identify and invest in next-generation skills.

Responsibilities

• Arcitect, design, and lead the implementation of complex backend systems and services that power core product experiences at scale.
• Define and drive technical strategy for your domain, making key decisions on system design, technology choices, and long-term architectural direction.
• Own the end-to-end reliability and performance of critical backend services, establishing SLOs, monitoring, and incident response best practices.
• Design scalable API frameworks and data models that serve as foundations for multiple product teams and external integrations.
• Lead cross-functional technical initiatives spanning multiple teams, coordinating with frontend, infrastructure, product, and design stakeholders.
• Identify and drive large-scale refactoring efforts, tackling tech debt and evolving legacy systems into modern, maintainable architectures.
• Mentor and grow engineers on the team through design reviews, code reviews, and hands-on technical guidance.
• Contribute to engineering-wide standards, tooling, and processes that raise the bar for code quality and developer productivity.

Requirements

• Senior backend engineer with 3-6 years of experience building and operating production backend systems at scale.
• Expert in at least one modern backend programming language (e.g., Python, Ruby, Go, Java, or Node.js) with strong fundamentals across the stack.
• Proven ability to design and build distributed systems — you've made meaningful architectural decisions around service decomposition, data consistency, fault tolerance, and observability.
• Deep expertise with relational databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL) and NoSQL stores, including schema design, query optimization, and data modeling for high-throughput workloads.
• Strong understanding of caching strategies (Redis/Memcached), asynchronous messaging (Kafka/RabbitMQ), and event-driven architectures.
• Hands-on experience with containerization (Docker/Kubernetes), CI/CD pipelines, and infrastructure-as-code practices.
• Track record of leading technical projects from ambiguous problem statements through to production delivery.

Qualifications

• AI fluency: Deep, hands-on proficiency with AI-powered development tools (e.g., GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Claude Code) — you don't just use them, you've developed workflows and best practices around them that you can teach others.
• Strong working knowledge of LLMs and agentic AI systems — you understand model capabilities, limitations, context management, tool use, and can reason about when and how to integrate AI into backend systems.
• Proven ability to leverage AI across the full software development lifecycle: architecture exploration, implementation, code review, test generation, documentation, incident analysis, and technical writing.
• Solid understanding of AI/ML fundamentals: transformer architectures, embedding models, inference optimization, RAG patterns, fine-tuning vs. prompt engineering trade-offs, and evaluation methodologies.
• Ability to evaluate and make technical recommendations on AI tooling, APIs, and integration patterns for your team and domain — including cost, latency, reliability, and security considerations.
• You actively follow developments in AI research and tooling, can separate hype from real engineering value, and drive adoption of AI-augmented practices within your team.

Skills

• Experience designing and operating systems serving millions of concurrent users with strict latency and availability requirements.
• Significant experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure), including serverless architectures, managed services, and cost optimization.
• Experience building platform-level APIs, SDKs, or developer tools consumed by internal or external engineering teams.
• A history of driving engineering culture improvements — whether through RFC processes, architecture review boards, or engineering blog contributions.

Benefits

We provide equal opportunity to everyone for employment based on individual performance and qualification. We never discriminate based on race, religion, national origin, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, age, marital, veteran, or disability status.

Pay

The base salary range for this role is $150,000 – $172,000, plus a target 10% annual bonus tied to individual and company performance.

Schedule

Our team works remotely and is flexible to accommodate different time zones and schedules.