Backend Engineer — Phoenix, AZ

About The Role

The role owns core backend services that power user-facing products at scale - designing APIs, building event-driven pipelines, and ensuring systems stay fast, reliable, and observable under real production load.

You will work directly with frontend and mobile engineers to shape contracts for features used by millions of users, and with platform teams to keep deployment, monitoring, and data infrastructure solid.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain REST and gRPC services in Go, Python, or Node.js, with a focus on low latency, clean API contracts, and testability

• Architect and optimize data models in PostgreSQL and Redis, including schema design, query tuning, and caching strategies

• Build and extend event-driven systems using Kafka or SQS, handling retries, idempotency, and exactly-once processing semantics where it matters

• Own services end-to-end: deployment on AWS (EKS/ECS), infrastructure-as-code with Terraform, dashboards, and alerting in Datadog or Grafana

• Partner with frontend and mobile teams to define API contracts and ship features from design through production rollout

• Improve system reliability through load testing, profiling, capacity planning, and post-incident reviews

• Write clean, well-tested code; lead code reviews and contribute to engineering standards across the team

What We Are Looking For

• 3+ years of backend software engineering experience building and operating production services at scale

• Strong proficiency in at least one backend language: Go, Python, Java, or Node.js

• Deep experience with relational databases (PostgreSQL or MySQL) and caching layers (Redis, ElastiCache)

• Hands-on experience with AWS (ECS, Lambda, RDS, SQS) and containerized deployments (Docker, Kubernetes)

• Solid grasp of distributed systems fundamentals: consistency, idempotency, backpressure, graceful degradation

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or equivalent practical experience

• Bonus: experience with Kafka event pipelines, Terraform, gRPC, or building APIs consumed by native mobile apps