Backend & Database Engineer

Stage Front•Columbia, MD

2d•Hybrid

About The Position

At Stage Front, we turn ticketing complexity into effortless opportunity. Our mission is to empower ticket sellers with smart technology, deep industry insights, and dedicated support to simplify operations and accelerate growth. Every decision we make is guided by our core values: Passion for live experiences, Grit to get the job done, Agility to adapt quickly, Customer-focus to drive success, Innovation to evolve constantly, and Teamwork to move as one team. Role Overview We are seeking a Backend Engineer with strong SQL expertise to help build and optimize the core systems that power our marketplace. This role blends software engineering ownership with deep SQL Server performance and data-layer expertise. You will take a leading role in database design, query optimization, and production performance tuning. This is a hybrid role, primarily remote, with one in-office day per week. The position follows a standard Monday-Friday schedule with occasional on-call coverage as part of a shared rotation. This is ideal for someone who: Thinks like a software engineer Loves solving complex data problems Enjoys optimizing real-world production systems Wants ownership beyond just writing queries What Success Looks Like in This Role Improving query performance and reducing production bottlenecks Proactively identifying performance, reliability, and technical debt risks Partnering closely with product and engineering to ship high-impact solutions Raising the bar for database and backend quality standards Designing scalable services and APIs with SQL Server at the core

Requirements

3-5 years of backend software development experience (C#, .NET Core preferred)
Strong SQL Server experience in a production environment
Advanced knowledge of: T-SQL
Indexing strategies
Execution plans
Query optimization
Transaction and isolation concepts
Experience building APIs and data-driven services
Experience troubleshooting performance issues in production
Familiarity with Git-based workflows and CI/CD pipelines
Strong communication and collaboration skills

Responsibilities

Database Performance Design and evolve database schemas aligned with product needs
Write and optimize complex T-SQL queries and stored procedures
Diagnose and resolve performance issues (execution plans, indexing, blocking, etc.)
Design effective indexing strategies and manage tradeoffs
Partner with engineers on safe schema changes and performance improvements
Support production troubleshooting related to database performance
Backend Engineering Design, build, and maintain backend services using C#, .NET Core, and SQL Server
Develop scalable APIs and business logic layers
Participate in architectural decisions for high-throughput systems
Contribute to CI/CD pipelines and Azure deployments
Reliability & Operational Excellence Troubleshoot production issues and participate in incident response
Improve monitoring and observability around database performance
Contribute to best practices, documentation, and runbooks
Support AlwaysOn availability and high-performance production workloads