Backend Application Engineer

Role Summary

Key Responsibilities

• Build internal platform services, shared infrastructure, and high-throughput backend systems.
• Develop durable event-processing pipelines, asynchronous job platforms, caching, rate-limiting, and request-shaping layers.
• Create platform abstractions, SDKs, and paved-road libraries for product teams.
• Establish observability, SLOs, and capacity planning; design fault-tolerant, multi-region services.
• Lead incident response and post-mortems; define API, schema, deployment, and compatibility standards.
• Optimize performance and cost; collaborate with infrastructure, security, and SRE teams.
• Mentor engineers, lead architecture discussions, and document designs, decisions, and operational runbooks.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a closely related discipline.
• Six or more years of professional backend or platform engineering experience.
• Experience building and operating internal platforms or shared services used by multiple engineering teams.
• Strong distributed-systems design expertise and proficiency in a major backend language.
• Knowledge of high-throughput messaging, streaming, event-driven architecture, and varied data storage systems.
• Experience leading multi-quarter platform initiatives across teams and making technical decisions.
• Strong communication and technical writing skills; ability to mentor engineers and contribute to engineering culture.

Preferred Qualifications

• Kubernetes platform or internal developer-platform experience is preferred.
• Open-source infrastructure contributions, service mesh or workflow orchestration familiarity, and platform API versioning experience are preferred.
• Public technical writing, conference talks, and community contributions are preferred.