Senior Backend Engineer, Core APIs with Site Reliability Engineering Focus

About the Role

This role is for an experienced Senior Backend Engineer focused on Core APIs with strong Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) responsibilities, based in Saudi Arabia. The position involves developing and managing highly reliable backend systems at large scale, with critical attention to performance, availability, latency, and cost efficiency. The engineer will combine backend development with SRE practices, owning the service lifecycle from design and implementation through incident management and continuous performance optimization within a fully remote and globally distributed environment.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and optimize backend services for real-time data processing and web APIs with a balance of reliability, scalability, latency, and cost considerations.
• Define and maintain service-level indicators (SLIs), service-level objectives (SLOs), and error budgets to guide engineering decisions.
• Build observability systems with metrics, structured logging, distributed tracing, dashboards, and alerting mechanisms.
• Participate equitably in on-call rotations for production incident response, mitigate customer impact, and facilitate blameless post-incident reviews.
• Automate operational processes to reduce toil and prevent repeat failures.
• Plan capacity, conduct load testing, perform performance analysis, and tune systems for scalable growth.
• Diagnose complex product and production issues through hypothesis generation, experimentation, data analysis, and engineering improvements.
• Integrate backend components with other services, working cross-functionally to maintain platform performance and reliability.
• Foster a data-driven, reliability-oriented engineering culture by sharing best practices and enhancing processes.
• Mentor engineers to enhance technical skills, engineering judgment, and operational excellence across the team.

Qualifications and Experience

• A minimum of five years’ experience in backend software engineering, including significant involvement with production systems.
• Strong background in formal SRE methodologies, such as managing error budgets, capacity planning, production readiness evaluations, fault-injection testing, and resilience practices.
• Proficiency in Go and/or Node.js with willingness to learn the other language.
• Experience designing and maintaining scalable backend APIs, microservices, and real-time data processing.
• Practical familiarity with Docker, Kubernetes, or equivalent container orchestration technologies.
• Experience with infrastructure as code tools like Terraform or AWS CloudFormation.
• Knowledge of observability platforms such as Datadog, including effective instrumentation and alerting.
• Participation in production on-call schedules with strong incident management skills.
• Proficient SQL skills and experience with data stores such as DynamoDB, Redis, or Elasticsearch.
• Comfortable with Git, shell scripting, IDEs, and continuous integration/deployment pipelines.
• Solid understanding of distributed systems, scalability challenges, reliability engineering, and performance optimization.
• Excellent English communication skills appropriate for asynchronous collaboration in a remote international team.
• Self-motivated, independent problem-solving ability coupled with strong teamwork skills.
• Passion for mentoring and raising organizational technical standards.
• A degree in Computer Science or related field is welcome but not mandatory if professional experience is equivalent.
• Experience with analytical platforms like ClickHouse, Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, or Databricks is a plus.
• Knowledge of performance profiling and cost optimization for high-throughput cloud workloads is advantageous.
• Contributions to large open-source projects and experience working across distributed international teams are beneficial.
• Experience with both Node.js and Go in backend environments and understanding of internet security and privacy mechanisms are highly valued.

Compensation and Benefits

• Indicative US salary range: $150,000 to $200,000 (cash compensation), with adjustments based on hiring location.
• Work fully remotely from a broad selection of countries, subject to local regulations and security policies.
• Engage with challenging, large-scale backend and online fraud detection systems.
• Access modern technology stack including Go, Node.js, TypeScript, AWS, Terraform, Docker, Kubernetes, Datadog, ClickHouse, and dbt.
• Benefit from a flexible, globally distributed work model focused on asynchronous collaboration.
• Opportunities for ongoing professional development, experimentation, and knowledge sharing.
• Strong focus on ownership, reliability, mentorship, and growth within the engineering team.
• Inclusive work culture valuing diverse viewpoints, backgrounds, and experiences.
• Note: Visa sponsorship is not provided; candidates must have work authorization in their home country.
• Employment regulations and compensation vary by country outside the US.