Senior Software Engineer
Rapta, Inc•Portland, OR
•$140,000 - $175,000•Hybrid
About The Position
We're seeking an experienced Senior Software Engineer to join our team in developing distributed, cutting-edge applied AI systems. This is a full-time position working directly with our engineering team to drive technical innovation and mentor mid-level and junior engineers.
Requirements
- 10+ years of professional experience developing distributed backend systems on Linux
- Deep curiosity for all software and systems architecture topics
- Expert-level Python programming and software architecture skills
- Strong system design skills with a focus on service boundaries, API contracts, and fault tolerance
- Fluency operating in Linux environments — comfortable living in the shell, reading logs, and reasoning about process, network, and filesystem behavior
- Excellence in technical communication and documentation
- Expertise in prompt engineering and AI-assisted development as a daily practice — Claude Code, Augment, Copilot, or equivalent is a force multiplier in your workflow, not a novelty
- Expertise in designing and operating microservice architectures at scale
- Deep experience with gRPC and Protocol Buffers — schema evolution, streaming RPCs, interceptors, and contract-first development
- Proficiency with version control and CI/CD practices
- Experience with containerized deployments (Docker on Linux hosts), service discovery, and distributed computing
- Strong grasp of observability: distributed tracing, structured logging, and metrics
Nice To Haves
- Previous experience in manufacturing, industrial automation, or quality control systems
- Experience with monorepo build systems (Bazel, Buck, Pants) and polyglot protobuf code generation
- Familiarity with backwards/forwards compatibility patterns and API versioning at scale
- Experience with real-time processing and edge computing constraints on resource-constrained Linux devices
- Experience with configuration management and infrastructure-as-code (Ansible, Terraform) for Linux fleet operations
Responsibilities
- Contribute to the architecture and development of production-grade distributed microservice systems running on Linux
- Drive technical initiatives to advance our service mesh, contract-first APIs, and inter-service communication patterns
- Build scalable data processing pipelines and high-throughput service infrastructure
- Design and evolve protobuf contracts and gRPC service definitions across the platform
- Provide technical guidance to junior team members
Benefits
- Meaningful early-stage equity at a late seed-stage company
- Competitive compensation and benefits package
- Professional development and learning opportunities
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
Education Level
No Education Listed
