Backend Software Engineer – Distributed Systems - 1818

PlacingIT•Palo Alto, CA

2d•Hybrid

About The Position

We're looking for a Backend Software Engineer with strong expertise in distributed systems to help build and scale the core platform powering a high-performance infrastructure product. This role focuses on designing and maintaining highly reliable backend systems that operate at production scale. You'll solve challenging problems involving concurrency, resource allocation, distributed coordination, and system reliability while partnering closely with engineering teams across the organization. If you're passionate about distributed systems, backend architecture, and building software that operates reliably under heavy load, we'd love to hear from you.

Requirements

3+ years of backend software engineering experience (5–8 years preferred).
Strong experience building and maintaining production distributed systems at scale.
Proven expertise handling concurrency, asynchronous processing, race conditions, and distributed architectures.
Professional experience developing production systems in Python.
Experience working at a high-growth startup or well-recognized technology company.
Strong understanding of software architecture, scalability, and backend system design.
Excellent debugging and problem-solving skills.
Candidates should have experience with many of the following technologies: Programming Python, Infrastructure & Cloud (Kubernetes, Docker, AWS, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Terraform), Databases & Operations (PostgreSQL), Infrastructure as Code (IaC), Monitoring and observability tools, CI/CD pipelines.

Nice To Haves

Experience building marketplace, auction, exchange, reservation, or billing systems.
Experience designing distributed scheduling or resource allocation platforms.
Strong systems design background.
Full-stack engineering experience with a backend focus.
Experience influencing technical architecture and engineering decisions.

Responsibilities

Design, build, and evolve highly scalable distributed backend systems.
Develop core orchestration services responsible for resource allocation and platform operations.
Build backend services that efficiently manage reservations, scheduling, and capacity allocation.
Improve system stability, fault tolerance, and operational reliability.
Design solutions for concurrency, race conditions, asynchronous processing, and distributed coordination.
Collaborate with engineering teams to ensure seamless integration across platform services.
Ship features end-to-end, including architecture, implementation, database migrations, deployment, monitoring, and operational support.
Contribute to CI/CD pipelines, cloud infrastructure, and deployment automation.
Participate in on-call rotations and production incident response.
Help improve operational tooling, automation, and engineering best practices.