Senior Backend & Platform Engineer

About the role

Backend development and databases

• Design and maintain Python and FastAPI backend applications, REST APIs, microservices, event-driven services, and asynchronous applications.
• Build third-party, payment, IoT, and external-service integrations; implement authentication, authorization, validation, and secure API communication.
• Write tests, review code, troubleshoot application issues, and improve application performance.
• Design PostgreSQL schemas and indexes, optimize SQL, manage migrations and transactions, and diagnose database bottlenecks.
• Use Redis or similar caching and efficient database access patterns.

Distributed systems and operations

• Build distributed services and asynchronous communication using messaging systems such as NATS, RabbitMQ, or Kafka.
• Implement retries, timeouts, idempotency, and fault-tolerant processing for high-concurrency and high-volume systems.
• Deploy and maintain applications on AWS; use services including EC2, ECS, App Runner, RDS, and S3.
• Containerize applications with Docker; configure CI/CD, environments, secrets, routing, and reverse proxies.
• Monitor application health and availability; implement logging, metrics, tracing, and alerting, and investigate production incidents.
• Improve reliability, resilience, scalability, resource use, and cloud costs; maintain production readiness and operational documentation.

Ownership and collaboration

• Own backend services end to end, from development through production deployment and ongoing operation.
• Collaborate with mobile, product, and engineering teams; take part in technical design and architecture reviews.
• Review code, mentor engineers, identify technical debt, and improve engineering practices and existing systems.

Essential qualifications

• At least 5 years of professional software engineering experience, including substantial hands-on backend development.
• Strong Python skills, including asynchronous programming, concurrency, and performance optimization; production experience with FastAPI or a comparable Python framework.
• Strong REST API and backend design knowledge, PostgreSQL experience, and experience with Redis or equivalent caching.
• Experience with external integrations, distributed systems, messaging patterns, background processing, Git, automated testing, debugging, and code quality practices.
• Practical AWS deployment and operations experience, Docker, and CI/CD pipeline experience.
• Comfort with Linux production environments and knowledge of HTTP/HTTPS, DNS, load balancing, reverse proxies, and networking fundamentals.
• Ability to deliver production-ready services independently and troubleshoot issues across application, database, and infrastructure layers.

Desirable experience

• Experience with NATS, RabbitMQ, or Kafka; TimescaleDB or other time-series databases; IoT, TCP sockets, or real-time device connectivity; or payment processing.
• Familiarity with Kubernetes, EKS, container orchestration, Terraform or Infrastructure as Code, Prometheus, Grafana, CloudWatch, or OpenTelemetry.
• Experience with high-concurrency systems, performance profiling, Go or Rust, or mobility, fleet management, and connected vehicle platforms.

First six months and role context