Senior Backend Engineer ((Python / Go)

Overview

We are seeking a skilled and passionate Senior Backend Engineer to join our team, focusing on the design, development, and maintenance of high-performance, scalable microservices. The ideal candidate will have strong expertise in Go (Golang), and a deep understanding of distributed systems architecture.

Essential Qualifications

Technical Skills

Core Experience

• 7+ years of professional experience in backend software development, with a significant focus on building and operating microservices in a production environment.

• Proven ability to work with and contribute to large-scale, distributed systems.

• Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP) for deployment, monitoring, and scaling.

Desired Qualifications

Process & Tools

• CI/CD: Experience setting up and maintaining automated deployment pipelines

• Observability: Proficiency with monitoring and logging tools

• Source Control: Expertise in Git and collaborative workflows

Architecture & Design

• Familiarity with event-driven architectures and streaming data processing.

• Experience with security best practices in API design (e.g., OAuth 2.0, JWT, input validation).

• Knowledge of performance tuning and optimization techniques for both Python and Go applications.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, implement, and maintain scalable and reliable backend microservices using Go.

• Collaborate with product managers and front-end teams to define API specifications and integration points.

• Ensure services are deployed, monitored, and scaled efficiently in a Kubernetes environment.

• Participate in code reviews, design discussions, and planning sessions.

• Troubleshoot and resolve complex production issues, ensuring high availability and performance.

• Drive continuous improvement in development processes, tooling, and infrastructure.

 

Must-have skills for a Senior Backend / Microservices Engineer (owner-level)

1) Production microservices ownership (not just “worked on”)

• Has owned at least 1–2 services end-to-end (design → build → deploy → on-call → incident fixes → scaling)

• Comfortable with service boundaries, APIs, versioning, backward compatibility, SLAs/SLOs

2) System design & architecture (senior bar)

• Can design systems with tradeoffs: latency, throughput, cost, reliability

• Patterns: idempotency, retries, timeouts, circuit breakers, async workflows, queues, eventual consistency

• Data design: relational vs NoSQL, caching, indexing, migrations, multi-tenant considerations (if relevant)

3) Strong debugging & problem-solving in real-world scenarios

• Can take an ambiguous production issue and drive it to resolution

• Uses a structured approach: reproduce → isolate → instrument → hypothesis → validate → fix → prevent

4) Linux fundamentals (practical, daily-use)

• Confident with commands/tools like: ps/top/htop, journalctl, systemctl, netstat/ss, lsof, curl, grep/sed/awk, strace (bonus), log parsing

• Understands networking basics (DNS, TLS, ports, timeouts)

5) Docker + container runtime competence

• Can explain Dockerfiles, layers, multi-stage builds, image size/security

• Debug containers: env vars, volumes, entrypoints, networking, resource limits

6) Observability / logging / diagnostics 

• Strong in structured logging, correlation IDs, trace context

• Metrics + tracing + logs as a system

• Datadog experience is a must-have , or a very credible equivalent (Prometheus/Grafana + OpenTelemetry + ELK) with proof they can ramp fast

7) Platform maturity 

• CI/CD, release processes, rollback strategies

• Basic security and reliability hygiene (secrets mgmt, least privilege, rate limiting)

Compensation & Benefits

Compensation

• $140,000 – $200,000 USD per year (depending on experience and qualifications)

Benefits

• 401(k) retirement plan

• Health, dental, and vision insurance

• Paid time off (PTO) and company holidays

• Flexible work arrangements

• Professional development and training support

• Performance-based bonuses (if applicable)