Backend Platform Software Engineer

Top Hat

1d•Remote

About The Position

The Core Backend team owns the systems and internal tooling that every other product team at Top Hat depends on. This role involves working in the deepest parts of the codebase where subtle failures have company-wide consequences and performance gains multiply across the system. The primary customers for this role are other developers. Success in this role means the platform is faster, more reliable, and easier to build on than it was before. This role is for someone who removes unnecessary abstractions, reaches for a profiler before a framework, and finds genuine satisfaction in leaving a system measurably better than they found it.

Requirements

2+ years of industry, research, or graduate-level experience, including at least 2 years working in large codebases with complex algorithms and data structures. Open source contributions at this scale count.
Background in compilers, databases, game engines, OS/browser internals, or high-frequency trading systems.
Programming on Linux/BSD/MacOS
Python (FastAPI, Django)
SQL (PostgreSQL, MySQL)
Distributed Systems
Profiling & Optimization
Ability to communicate with developers and non-developers alike, and adjust level of abstraction to fit the audience
Excellent written communication skills for planning and documenting work on a geographically dispersed team
Ability to break down ambiguous problems into concrete steps without waiting for full specifications
Ability to build accurate mental models of large, unfamiliar codebases quickly and use them to identify what matters
Careful consideration of data structures and performance characteristics of solutions
Taking full ownership of quality: your own code and the code you touch, refactoring as necessary to maintain a long-lived codebase
Understanding of tradeoffs involved in using LLMs to solve problems and a strong feel for the types of problems they excel at solving

Nice To Haves

TypeScript/JavaScript (React)
Cloud Experience (AWS, GCP, etc.)
Observability (OpenTelemetry, Datadog, etc.)
Infrastructure-As-Code (Terraform, Ansible, etc.)
Troubleshooting TCP/DNS/HTTP/SMTP/etc.
Database Administration, Maintenance & Scaling
Designing APIs for Customers

Responsibilities

Core backend systems, libraries, and internal developer tooling used across product development and customer support
Performance, reliability, and architectural improvements to the system with the highest downstream impact
Code quality and technical standards for the system surface area you own