Backend Software Engineer

ClearlyRated • Portland, OR

6h • 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.

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 real, the stakes are high, and every engineer on the team does work that matters.

Requirements

• Java you understand at the JVM level. Concurrency, memory model, garbage collection, exception hierarchy — you can reason about what the runtime is doing, not just what your code says.
• Spring Boot / Spring ecosystem depth. Or deep understanding of dependency injection and IoC from another framework — we care that you understand the pattern, not just the annotations.
• SQL and data modelling confidence. You can write a query with joins, aggregations, and window functions. You think about indexes. You understand what an N+1 problem looks like in production.
• API design instincts. You know what makes an API contract good and what makes it a maintenance nightmare. You’ve thought about versioning, error semantics, and idempotency.
• Systems thinking under failure. You consider retries, timeouts, idempotency, and consistency before you consider happy paths.
• You’ve built something that handles real load. Even in a personal or academic context — something where correctness and reliability were actual constraints, not just nice-to-haves.
• Applicants must be authorized to work in the United States without requiring visa sponsorship.
• We are unable to support Student Visas as well.

Nice To Haves

• .NET / C# experience is a genuine plus. We maintain services in both ecosystems. Engineers who can move across the Java–.NET boundary are valuable.
• 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

• System, Database and API design as a first-class skill. You'll design service boundaries, data models, and REST API contracts (consumed by our frontend, enterprise integrations, and third-party clients) that have to last. Versioning, backward compatibility, idempotency, and clean error contracts are core to the job, not afterthoughts.
• Event-driven microservices on GCP Pub/Sub: async processing, backpressure handling, dead-letter queues, the full picture.
• Webhook-triggered survey automation engine. Business events in the client's system translate into survey sends through a reliable, auditable, event-driven workflow.
• Resilient, observable services: retries, timeouts, circuit breakers, structured logging, metrics, and tracing baked into how we build.
• Security and SSO integration for enterprise clients with complex credential and access models.
• Permission and access control systems that reflect matrix organizational hierarchies. The authorization layer is genuinely interesting here.
• 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