Backend Software Engineer (API-focused)
About The Position
We are seeking a mid-level Backend Software Engineer to join our development team, supporting hundreds of law enforcement agencies across the United States. Off Duty Management is the leading provider of off duty program solutions to law enforcement agencies and first responders. We are building OfficerTRAK, a SaaS platform, and the API layer is critical for connecting our front end, mobile apps, and internal services. This role will focus on designing, building, and maintaining the FastAPI microservices that power our product. You will be involved in the full lifecycle of a service, from design to deployment and monitoring. This position is ideal for someone who has experience with production-grade FastAPI services, values test coverage and code quality, and desires ownership over API design, security, and scaling.
Requirements
- 3+ years of professional backend software development experience, including production use of Python.
- Strong hands-on experience with FastAPI building production APIs.
- Solid understanding of relational database design, normalization, and SQL query optimization (PostgreSQL preferred).
- Experience with Celery or a comparable distributed task queue (e.g., RQ, Kafka consumers) for asynchronous processing.
- Experience deploying and operating services in Kubernetes, ideally on Azure (AKS).
- Practical experience writing unit, integration, and functional tests (pytest or similar) as part of the regular development workflow.
- Working knowledge of authentication and authorization standards (OAuth2, JWT, API keys, RBAC).
- Understanding of API security best practices (OWASP API Top 10, input sanitization, secrets management, rate limiting).
- Comfort with Git-based collaborative workflows (pull requests, code review, branching strategies).
- Familiarity with containerization (Docker) and CI/CD pipelines.
- Clear communication and a collaborative, ownership-driven approach to working with engineers.
Nice To Haves
- Experience with Azure-specific services (Azure Key Vault, Azure Container Registry, Azure Monitor / App Insights).
- Familiarity with API documentation tooling (OpenAPI/Swagger).
- Experience with message brokers supporting Celery (Redis, RabbitMQ).
- Experience with database migration tooling (e.g., Alembic).
- Exposure to observability stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry) and distributed tracing.
- Exposure to Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Helm).
- Understanding of domain-driven design or broader microservice architecture patterns.
- Experience scaling APIs for a growing SaaS platform.
Responsibilities
- Design and build production-grade FastAPI services — define clean, versioned RESTful API contracts, request/response schemas (Pydantic), and service boundaries within our microservice architecture.
- Own data modeling and query design — design normalized, performant PostgreSQL schemas, write and optimize SQL queries, and manage migrations (e.g., Alembic) as services evolve.
- Build reliable asynchronous workflows — design and maintain Celery tasks and queues for background processing, retries, and scheduled jobs.
- Ship and operate services on our Azure/Kubernetes platform — containerize services, deploy to AKS, and troubleshoot issues in a live production environment.
- Build in authentication, authorization, and security from the start — implement OAuth2/JWT-based auth, role-based access control, and follow API security best practices (OWASP API Top 10, input validation, secrets management).
- Write meaningful, layered test coverage — unit, integration, and functional/end-to-end tests (pytest) that give the team confidence to ship quickly.
- Participate in code reviews and design discussions — give and receive thoughtful feedback and help shape API and data model decisions across the team.
- Instrument services for observability — add logging, metrics, and tracing so issues can be diagnosed quickly in production.
- Collaborate cross-functionally — partner with frontend, mobile, and DevOps engineers to define API contracts and keep services aligned with product needs.
- Contribute to CI/CD pipelines — help maintain automated build, test, and deployment workflows for the services you own.
Benefits
- Equal opportunity employer status
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Mid Level
Education Level
No Education Listed
