Backend Developer Consultant (GraphQL & Kafka)

Bitovi•Chicago, IL

12d•Remote

About The Position

Bitovi is looking for a Backend Developer Consultant to join us as we transform technology delivery. We build and operate distributed backend systems for enterprise clients: Go and TypeScript services, GraphQL APIs, and Kafka-based event streaming, running on AWS. If you want to build exceptional systems, take API design and data flow seriously, and have ideas on how to make delivery more collaborative, validation-driven, and swift, we want to work with you! You're experienced building and running applications at the enterprise level, and you're comfortable owning both the code and how it behaves in production. You think about the whole system, from service internals and API contracts to the event streams and data stores behind them. You thrive when given opportunities to deliver real-world platforms as an integral team member, and you have the expertise to interface and communicate confidently with stakeholders.

Requirements

Strong working knowledge of Go, including concurrency patterns, and practical experience with TypeScript/Node on the server.
Experience designing and building GraphQL APIs: schema design, resolvers, and performance concerns (N+1, dataloaders, caching, pagination).
Experience designing and operating Kafka-based event streaming systems: topic and partition design, consumer groups, schema management, and reasoning about ordering, delivery guarantees, and consumer lag.
Database schema design and development expertise, including query performance and evolving schemas safely.
Hands-on AWS experience: architecting, deploying, and operating production systems (networking, IAM, messaging, and data services).
A systems engineering mindset: understanding of complex scaling issues, concurrency, backpressure, caching strategies, and failure modes across distributed systems.
Experience planning and executing migrations: application replatforming, data and schema migrations, or moving workloads between environments with minimal downtime.
A thorough understanding of CI/CD pipelines and modern delivery practices.
Experience with observability in practice: logging, metrics, and tracing (OpenTelemetry a plus).
Experience building modern microservice-based or serverless applications.
Working comfort with Kubernetes: deploying and debugging your own services in a cluster.

Nice To Haves

Experience with additional backend languages (Java, Python, C#, etc.) is a plus
Federation experience a plus
Operating Kafka in production (MSK, Confluent, or self-managed)
Kafka Connect, Kafka Streams, and schema registry workflows (Avro/Protobuf)
Migrating between clusters or providers, and integrating Kafka with downstream analytical stores such as ClickHouse
Experience with different techniques for processing large datasets, such as Lambda and Kappa architectures
API design across paradigms (GraphQL, REST, gRPC)
AuthN/AuthZ and related technologies (sessions, API tokens, JWTs)
Automated testing across the stack (unit, integration, performance/benchmarking)
Additional queueing and messaging technologies (AWS SQS/SNS, RabbitMQ)
Infrastructure as code: Terraform/OpenTofu
GitOps-style delivery with ArgoCD or Flux
Helm chart authoring, secrets management, and autoscaling concepts
Experience with a durable execution or workflow engine (Temporal, Airflow, Prefect, or similar), including retries, timeouts, and idempotency

Responsibilities

Build durable systems. Design and implement Go and TypeScript services, GraphQL APIs, and Kafka-based event pipelines, and help clients adopt event streaming the right way, from first topic to production scale.
Lead modernization efforts. Plan and execute large-scale modernization efforts, moving services and data between platforms and clouds, with safety, observability, and minimal disruption as first-class requirements.
Own what you ship. Work with our platform engineers to run your services well on AWS and Kubernetes. Treat reliability, observability, and repeatability as part of the deliverable, not an afterthought.
Consult with clients to build outcome-driven applications and platforms, guiding them through the process, identifying potential problems and unknowns, and tackling challenges.
Travel. This is a remote, full-time position that requires the ability to travel. We travel an average of 3 to 5 days every quarter, and we'll always do our best to work with your schedule.
Discuss opportunities for you to present at conferences, attend and give training, plan and run meetups or local groups, and create various kinds of content in your expertise.