Senior Backend Software Engineer, Java | Kafka - TheLoops

IFS • San Francisco, CA

63d • $175,000 - $200,000

About The Position

TheLoops empowers leaders and teams to transform their work through our innovative agentic platform, driving increased efficiency and operational scale across multiple large industry segments. We’re looking for a Senior Engineer to help design and build the backbone of real-time, distributed AI platforms. You’ll work on systems that orchestrate massive data flows, reactive services, and agentic workloads—platforms that must adapt dynamically and operate reliably under heavy and unpredictable load. Collaborate across engineering teams to deliver infrastructure that is scalable, resilient, and observable by design. If you’re passionate about high-performance computing, resilient architecture, and enabling real-time intelligence, this role is for you.

Requirements

• 5+ years of experience building distributed systems in production.
• Strong expertise with Kafka (topics, partitions, consumers, tuning, schema registry, stream processing) or similar messaging/event systems.
• Experience building highly concurrent, event-driven, or distributed systems using frameworks like Akka or Erlang.
• Solid Java programming skills; experience with concurrency and modern Java frameworks.
• Understanding of agentic workloads and dynamic system orchestration (microservices representing intelligent agents).
• Experience designing scalable APIs, message protocols (Protobuf, Avro), and event-driven architectures.
• Familiarity with cloud-native environments (Kubernetes, service mesh, container orchestration).

Nice To Haves

• Experience with serverless or function-as-a-service scaling models.
• Contributions to open-source distributed systems projects.
• Exposure to AI/ML-driven orchestration or agentic frameworks.
• Familiarity with observability tooling: Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, Kafka monitoring, etc.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement scalable, distributed platform components using Java, Kafka, Akka (Typed), gRPC, or similar technologies.
• Build and optimize data pipelines capable of handling high-throughput events with low latency and high reliability.
• Lead efforts in agentic scaling—dynamically spawning, routing, and managing intelligent agent workloads.
• Develop resilient systems that self-heal, auto-scale, and degrade gracefully under pressure.
• Define and implement metrics, tracing, and observability for end-to-end system behavior and performance.
• Collaborate closely with infrastructure, SRE, and product teams to align platform scalability with growth and reliability goals.
• Investigate and resolve performance bottlenecks and propose long-term architectural improvements.
• Participate in on-call rotations, architecture reviews, and technical design sessions.

Benefits

• Salary Range: $175,000-200,000 total comp
• Flexible paid time off, including sick and holiday
• Medical, dental, & vision insurance
• 401K with Company contribution
• Flexible spending accounts
• Life insurance and disability benefits
• Tuition assistance
• Community involvement and volunteering events

What This Job Offers

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