Senior Backend Engineer

Obvio•San Carlos, CA

1d•Hybrid

About The Position

We're hiring a Senior Backend Engineer to join our Ticketing & Payments team in San Carlos, CA. This is a hands-on, individual-contributor role for someone who wants to make an impact on how traffic enforcement officers engage with our platform. You will play a key role in building observable and scalable systems without compromising security and reliability of the services we enable. This team collaborates with many cross functional teams - from Infrastructure to Product to Support - to deliver solutions that address evolving user needs.

Requirements

5+ years of experience building and operating large scale production systems
5+ years of programming with software programming languages like Go, Ruby, Java, Python, Kotlin, or similar
5+ Experience designing and building scalable backend APIs or platform services
3+ years of real operational experience - comfortable owning a system in production, diagnosing issues under pressure, and improving reliability over time
Strong understanding of API design best practices - security, data format and interchange, version control and CI/CD
A track record of working directly with product management shaping solutions, not just receiving specs
Interest in working as a generalist across tech stacks to solve problems for internal and external customers.
A pragmatic mindset: able to tell the difference between the ideal solution and the right solution for right now
You take ownership of your work and collaborate well with teammates. You understand what mentoring looks like and extend that to early in career engineers

Nice To Haves

Knowledge building distributed systems
Experience working in platform teams that build and maintain foundational services for product engineers by teams

Responsibilities

Scope, design, build and maintain APIs that are secure, scalable, and enterprise-ready
Improve tenancy and isolation boundaries across our violations, citations and payments systems, with a clear point of view on where and why systems should be separated
Partner closely with product management to turn business needs into pragmatic, well-scoped technical solutions
Make real engineering trade-offs - build vs. buy, flexibility vs. simplicity and clearly communicate the reasoning behind them
Operate what you build: respond to incidents, and drive toward root cause rather than just mitigation
Model strong technical judgment and decision-making. Mentor and coach engineers to reason through trade-offs and write decisions down.
Set and hold a high technical bar, methodically raising the quality of design and execution across the team
Collaborate effectively in a distributed and hybrid team, maintaining open communication and strong connections