Senior Backend Engineer, Core APIs with Site Reliability Engineering Focus

Position Overview

This senior engineering opportunity is with a partner company operating in the United Arab Emirates, focusing on building and maintaining highly reliable backend systems at significant scale. The role emphasizes the development of core APIs and real-time data services prioritizing performance, availability, latency, and cost-efficiency.

Key Responsibilities

• Design and implement scalable backend services for real-time data processing and web APIs, optimizing for reliability, latency, and cost.
• Establish and manage Service Level Indicators (SLIs), Service Level Objectives (SLOs), and error budgets for core API offerings to guide engineering priorities.
• Develop and sustain robust observability through metrics, logs, tracing, dashboards, and alerts.
• Participate in fair on-call rotations to handle production incidents, reduce customer impact, and lead blameless post-incident reviews.
• Automate routine operational tasks to minimize toil and prevent repeat failures.
• Conduct capacity planning, load testing, and performance tuning to prepare systems for increasing demand.
• Analyse complex production issues, formulating hypotheses and validating fixes through experiments and data analysis.
• Integrate backend components with other services, collaborating with cross-functional teams to ensure scalability and reliability.
• Promote a data-driven and reliability-oriented engineering culture, sharing best practices and improving processes.
• Mentor junior engineers to nurture technical abilities, sound engineering judgment, and operational excellence.

Qualifications and Requirements

• Over 5 years of backend software engineering experience including hands-on involvement with production systems you have built and operated.
• Proven knowledge of formal Site Reliability Engineering practices such as error budgets, capacity planning, production readiness reviews, and resilience testing.
• Proficient in Go and/or Node.js with readiness to learn complementary technologies.
• Experience designing scalable APIs, microservices, and real-time data processing architectures.
• Hands-on use of Docker and Kubernetes or comparable container orchestration for production workloads.
• Familiarity with infrastructure-as-code tools like Terraform or AWS CloudFormation.
• Working experience with observability tools such as Datadog including instrumentation, monitoring, logging, and alerting.
• Active involvement in production on-call rotations, incident management, mitigation, and post-incident analysis.
• Strong SQL expertise and knowledge of databases/datastores such as DynamoDB, Redis, or Elasticsearch.
• Comfortable with Git, shell scripting, IDEs, and CI/CD pipeline tooling.
• Deep understanding of distributed system design, scalability, reliability, and performance optimisation.
• Excellent English communication skills suited to a remote and internationally distributed environment.
• Self-driven with ability to own complex tasks and collaborate effectively across teams.
• Passion for mentoring peers and enhancing engineering standards within the team.
• A Computer Science degree or related field is preferred; equivalent professional experience accepted.
• Experience with analytical platforms like ClickHouse, Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, or Databricks is advantageous.
• Skills in performance profiling and cost optimization for cloud workloads are a plus.
• Contributions to major open-source projects and international, asynchronous team work experience are beneficial.
• Knowledge of both Node.js and Go backend technologies, along with internet security and privacy principles, is highly regarded.

Compensation and Benefits

• US-based compensation benchmark ranges between $150,000 and $200,000 annually; actual pay varies with location.
• Fully remote work setup with eligibility to work from various countries, complying with local regulations and security standards.
• The role offers a chance to work on large-scale backend systems and fraud prevention technology featuring challenging reliability and performance goals.
• Use of cutting-edge technologies including Go, Node.js, TypeScript, AWS, Terraform, Docker, Kubernetes, Datadog, ClickHouse, and dbt.
• Flexible, globally distributed team with asynchronous collaboration and communication emphasis.
• Ongoing opportunities for technical learning, experimentation, and knowledge sharing.
• A workplace culture emphasizing engineering ownership, reliability, mentorship, and professional development.
• Inclusive environment welcoming diverse backgrounds and perspectives.
• Note: Visa sponsorship is not available; applicants must have authorization to work from their home location.
• Compensation and employment terms may differ based on country-specific regulations outside the US.

Additional Information

This position is managed by a partner company which conducts application reviews and subsequent hiring steps independently. The employer employs AI tools to facilitate unbiased candidate screening, but final hiring decisions are made by human recruiters. Applicants' personal data is handled in accordance with applicable data protection laws, including GDPR, with rights to access, correct, erase, or object to processing.