Senior Backend Engineer

Plenful • Chicago, IL

39d

About The Position

We’re looking for a Senior Backend Engineer to design and build systems that power our distributed computing, data workflows, and core infrastructure. You’ll take ownership of major backend components, contribute to database and orchestration architecture, and collaborate closely with our DevOps and ML teams. This role is ideal for an experienced engineer who loves solving complex technical problems, improving system reliability, and contributing to the evolution of a high-performing backend platform.

Requirements

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• Solid experience with distributed systems, workflow orchestration, and large-scale backend development.
• Strong database expertise: SQL, schema design, and performance optimization.
• Solid computer science fundamentals (data structures, algorithms, system design).
• Experience with large-scale data pipelines and external integrations.
• Ability to take ownership of projects and collaborate effectively across engineering, DevOps, and ML teams.
• Proven experience improving reliability, performance, and maintainability in production systems.
• Strong communication skills for technical discussions and documentation.

Responsibilities

• Contribute to the design and evolution of our workflow orchestration system that runs across serverless and containerized environments, processing millions of tasks each month.
• Implement scheduling, queuing, rate limiting, and retry logic for reliable and fair resource allocation.
• Build components for state tracking, error handling, timeouts, and cleanup across distributed tasks.
• Collaborate with DevOps to enhance observability, structured logging, tracing, and deployment automation.
• Design and optimize schemas for scalable and flexible data storage.
• Improve query performance and efficiency across large datasets through indexing, caching, and connection pooling.
• Ensure data integrity, concurrency control, and compliance with data governance standards.
• Support replication, backups, and disaster recovery efforts in partnership with DevOps.
• Build and maintain integrations with SFTP, email, databases, spreadsheets, and REST APIs, including credential management and failure recovery.
• Develop and operate file processing pipelines handling high data volumes across diverse formats (PDF, Excel, CSV, JSON).
• Work with healthcare data formats (HL7, X12, EDI) and collaborate with ML/AI teams on data pipelines for model training and inference.
• Create and maintain webhook handlers, polling services, and event-driven workflows.
• Take ownership of complex backend projects from design through deployment.
• Participate in architectural discussions, propose improvements, and help drive high reliability and maintainability standards.
• Contribute to reducing technical debt and improving operational efficiency.
• Mentor junior engineers through code reviews and technical discussions.
• Participate in incident response and postmortems with a focus on prevention and system resilience.

Benefits

• Great benefits include unlimited PTO, health insurance, meal stipend, health & wellness stipend, team offsites, 401K matching, and stock options
• Opportunities to further develop and refine your partnership acumen by partnering with our seasoned leaders

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed
• Number of Employees: 11-50 employees