Senior Backend Engineer, Product

Sage • New York, NY

70d • $175,000 - $210,000

About The Position

Sage is on a mission to improve care and quality of life for older adults, starting with those residing in senior living facilities. Falls are the leading cause of injury-related death among adults over 65. And yet, fall prevention and emergency response systems for older adults are archaic and ineffective. At Sage we've built a more modern way of understanding when older adults need help, including methods for residents to alert caregivers when in need of help, and corresponding software for caregivers to triage response. Our company mission is to create a product that our client counterparts love, and this role is a key part of that objective. Sage is a small, tight team of ambitious, multi-disciplinary entrepreneurs. We are a software-enabled, mission-driven company, and are focused only on the problems that are central to achieving that mission. At Sage, we work hard and fast but also know that to build a truly important company, we need to treat our work as a marathon, and not a sprint. The journey matters.

Requirements

• Strong proficiency in Java and backend service frameworks (Spring Boot, Dropwizard).
• Deep familiarity with ORMs (Hibernate, JPA) and data persistence patterns.
• Solid understanding of service design principles and clean architecture patterns.
• Hands-on experience with Postgres and SQL performance tuning.
• Working knowledge of NoSQL databases (DynamoDB, MongoDB, or similar).
• Understanding of transactions, consistency, and data modeling in distributed systems.
• Experience with SQS, Kafka, or equivalent queues/streaming systems.
• Knowledge of event-driven architecture and at-least-once/exactly-once delivery guarantees.
• Experience designing, documenting, and evolving APIs with OpenAPI.
• Familiarity with best practices for RESTful API versioning, error handling, and security.
• Strong collaboration skills for working with frontend engineers (consumer experience) and infrastructure engineers (reliability and deployment).
• Familiarity with Gradle build system and dependency management.
• Strong experience with CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab, or similar).
• Knowledge of containerization & orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes).
• Strong understanding of logging, monitoring, and tracing in distributed systems.
• Experience troubleshooting production issues in complex, containerized environments.
• Familiarity with software design patterns and ability to apply them thoughtfully.
• Strong opinions about service design, API design, and data architecture.
• Ability to mentor peers and set engineering standards.

Nice To Haves

• Experience in multi-tenant SaaS environments.
• Exposure to high-throughput, low-latency systems.
• Background in domain-driven design (DDD) or event-sourcing.
• Familiarity with cloud-native services (AWS/GCP).

Responsibilities

• Architect & Build Services: Design, implement, and scale backend services in Java using frameworks like Spring Boot or Dropwizard.
• Data & Persistence: Design data models and persistence strategies across Postgres and NoSQL stores (DynamoDB or similar).
• Messaging & Integration: Build and operate systems that leverage message queues (SQS, Kafka, etc.) for asynchronous communication and event-driven workflows.
• API Design & Management: Define, document, and evolve REST APIs using OpenAPI, ensuring consistency, clarity, and strong collaboration with front-end teams.
• Optimize for Scale & Reliability: Ensure services are performant, observable, fault-tolerant, and capable of handling 24/7 production workloads.
• CI/CD & Tooling: Own build pipelines and service delivery using Gradle, automated testing, and CI/CD best practices.
• Collaborate Cross-Functionally: Work closely with front-end engineers to design API contracts, and with infrastructure engineers to ensure backend services integrate seamlessly into our containerized, cloud-native platform.
• Service & Data Design Leadership: Set patterns for clean, consistent API design, service boundaries, and data architecture across the engineering org.
• Mentor & Guide: Provide technical leadership, perform design and code reviews, and coach teammates in backend engineering best practices.

Benefits

• Competitive base compensation along with stock options.
• Fully-paid health and dental insurance coverage for all employees.
• Health benefits including vision insurance, membership to premium primary and urgent care, and online medical health providers.
• Take as you need time off policy, in addition to 7 paid holidays and a company-wide winter break during the holidays.
• Office lunch and a fully stocked snack bar.
• Up to 2 remote days per week.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Number of Employees: 5,001-10,000 employees