Backend Software Engineer

ClearlyRated • Portland, OR

2d • Remote

About The Position

We're building the backend platform that powers survey automation and relationship intelligence for some of the world's largest professional services firms. If you love systems design, API design, and clean backend engineering, read on. About ClearlyRated ClearlyRated is a B2B SaaS platform that helps professional services firms, from global engineering consultancies to staffing agencies, measure, understand, and act on client satisfaction data. Our NPS-driven platform processes millions of survey interactions, powers real-time relationship health scoring, and is in the middle of a significant platform evolution toward event-driven survey automation and a modern, service-oriented backend built on Google Cloud. We're a small, focused engineering team building systems that operate at enterprise scale. That means the problems are the real, the stakes are high, and every engineer on the team does work that matters.

Requirements

• Deep understanding of Java at the JVM level, including concurrency, memory model, garbage collection, and exception hierarchy.
• In-depth knowledge of the Spring Boot/Spring ecosystem, or a deep understanding of dependency injection and IoC from another framework.
• Confidence in SQL and data modeling, including writing queries with joins, aggregations, and window functions, understanding indexes, and identifying N+1 problems.
• Strong API design instincts, understanding what makes a good API contract and considering versioning, error semantics, and idempotency.
• Systems thinking under failure, considering retries, timeouts, idempotency, and consistency.
• Experience building systems that handle real load, where correctness and reliability were actual constraints.

Nice To Haves

• GCP experience: Pub/Sub, Dataflow, BigQuery, Vertex AI
• Kafka or other message queue experience: consumer groups, offset management, partition strategy
• Kubernetes and container orchestration
• Event sourcing or CQRS patterns
• Experience with observability tooling — distributed tracing, structured logging, alerting on the things that matter

Responsibilities

• Design and build real systems that enterprise clients depend on, focusing on correctness, observability, and resilience.
• Design service boundaries, data models, and REST API contracts with considerations for versioning, backward compatibility, idempotency, and clean error contracts.
• Develop event-driven microservices on GCP Pub/Sub, handling asynchronous processing, backpressure, and dead-letter queues.
• Build a webhook-triggered survey automation engine that translates business events into reliable, auditable, event-driven workflows.
• Implement resilient and observable services with retries, timeouts, circuit breakers, structured logging, metrics, and tracing.
• Integrate security and SSO for enterprise clients with complex credential and access models.
• Develop permission and access control systems that reflect matrix organizational hierarchies.
• Create an integration layer that connects enterprise data sources to our platform through well-designed service interfaces.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed