Senior Backend Engineer

RapidFort, Inc.

8h•$140,000 - $200,000•Hybrid

About The Position

We are seeking a skilled and passionate Senior 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 Go (Golang), and a deep understanding of distributed systems architecture.

Requirements

Expertise in Go (Golang) for building robust, high-concurrency microservices.
Expertise in designing, developing, and deploying RESTful APIs.
Advanced proficiency in Python with frameworks like FastAPI, Flask, or Django.
Advanced knowledge of Keycloak, API authentication, and JWT.
Advanced experience with Realtime analytics (Clickhouse).
Advanced experience with Relational databases (MySQL) including complex query optimization.
Advanced experience with NoSQL databases (Redis).
Advanced experience with Kubernetes for deployment and scaling.
Advanced experience with Docker container build.
Advanced experience in writing comprehensive unit, integration, and end-to-end tests.
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.
Production microservices ownership (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.
Ability to design systems with tradeoffs: latency, throughput, cost, reliability.
Knowledge of patterns: idempotency, retries, timeouts, circuit breakers, async workflows, queues, eventual consistency.
Knowledge of data design: relational vs NoSQL, caching, indexing, migrations, multi-tenant considerations.
Strong debugging & problem-solving skills in real-world scenarios.
Ability to take an ambiguous production issue and drive it to resolution using a structured approach.
Practical, daily-use Linux fundamentals, including commands/tools like: ps/top/htop, journalctl, systemctl, netstat/ss, lsof, curl, grep/sed/awk, strace (bonus), log parsing.
Understanding of networking basics (DNS, TLS, ports, timeouts).
Competence with Docker and container runtimes, including explaining Dockerfiles, layers, multi-stage builds, image size/security.
Ability to debug containers: env vars, volumes, entrypoints, networking, resource limits.
Strong experience with observability/logging/diagnostics, including structured logging, correlation IDs, trace context.
Experience with 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.
Experience with CI/CD, release processes, and rollback strategies.
Understanding of basic security and reliability hygiene (secrets management, least privilege, rate limiting).

Nice To Haves

Experience setting up and maintaining automated deployment pipelines (CI/CD).
Proficiency with monitoring and logging tools.
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 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.