Microservice Backend Engineer (Python/Go)

RapidFort, Inc.

5h • $120,000 - $200,000

About The Position

We are seeking a skilled and passionate Backend Engineer to join our team, focusing on the design, development, and maintenance of high-performance, scalable microservices. The ideal candidate will have strong expertise in both Python and Go (Golang), and a deep understanding of distributed systems architecture.

Requirements

• U.S. citizenship required due to federal contract requirements (No active security clearance needed at time of hire)
• 7+ years of professional experience in backend software development, with a significant focus on building and operating microservices in a production environment.
• Proven ability to work with and contribute to large-scale, distributed systems.
• Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP) for deployment, monitoring, and scaling.
• Python (Deep expertise with frameworks like FastAPI, Flask, or Django)
• Go (Golang) (Experience building robust, high-concurrency microservices)
• Designing, developing, and deploying RESTful APIs
• Keycloak, API authentication, JWT
• Realtime analytics (Clickhouse)
• Relational databases (MySQL) including complex query optimization.
• NoSQL databases (Redis).
• Kubernetes for deployment and scaling.
• Writing comprehensive unit, integration, and end-to-end tests.
• Production microservices ownership (not just “worked on”)
• Has owned at least 1–2 services end-to-end (design → build → deploy → on-call → incident fixes → scaling)
• Comfortable with service boundaries, APIs, versioning, backward compatibility, SLAs/SLOs
• System design & architecture (senior bar)
• Can design systems with tradeoffs: latency, throughput, cost, reliability
• Patterns: idempotency, retries, timeouts, circuit breakers, async workflows, queues, eventual consistency
• Data design: relational vs NoSQL, caching, indexing, migrations, multi-tenant considerations (if relevant)
• Strong debugging & problem-solving in real-world scenarios
• Can take an ambiguous production issue and drive it to resolution
• Uses a structured approach: reproduce → isolate → instrument → hypothesis → validate → fix → prevent
• Linux fundamentals (practical, daily-use)
• Confident with commands/tools like: ps/top/htop, journalctl, systemctl, netstat/ss, lsof, curl, grep/sed/awk, strace (bonus), log parsing
• Understands networking basics (DNS, TLS, ports, timeouts)
• Docker + container runtime competence
• Can explain Dockerfiles, layers, multi-stage builds, image size/security
• Debug containers: env vars, volumes, entrypoints, networking, resource limits
• Observability / logging / diagnostics
• Strong in structured logging, correlation IDs, trace context
• Metrics + tracing + logs as a system
• Datadog experience is a must-have , or a very credible equivalent (Prometheus/Grafana + OpenTelemetry + ELK) with proof they can ramp fast
• Platform maturity
• CI/CD, release processes, rollback strategies
• Basic security and reliability hygiene (secrets mgmt, least privilege, rate limiting)
• Coding in Python - senior architecture + prod ops + observability.

Nice To Haves

• CI/CD: Experience setting up and maintaining automated deployment pipelines
• Observability: Proficiency with monitoring and logging tools
• Source Control: Expertise in Git and collaborative workflows
• Familiarity with event-driven architectures and streaming data processing.
• Experience with security best practices in API design (e.g., OAuth 2.0, JWT, input validation).
• Knowledge of performance tuning and optimization techniques for both Python and Go applications.

Responsibilities

• Design, implement, and maintain scalable and reliable backend microservices using Python and Go.
• Collaborate with product managers and front-end teams to define API specifications and integration points.
• Ensure services are deployed, monitored, and scaled efficiently in a Kubernetes environment.
• Participate in code reviews, design discussions, and planning sessions.
• Troubleshoot and resolve complex production issues, ensuring high availability and performance.
• Drive continuous improvement in development processes, tooling, and infrastructure.

What This Job Offers

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