Senior Backend Engineer
Kalder
Location
New York City
Employment Type
Full time
Location Type
On-site
Department
Engineering
We’re looking for a Senior Backend Engineer who loves system design & architecture, writes high-performance Go, and knows how to take services from laptop to production with efficient, reliable deployments. You’ll also use AI coding tools to accelerate delivery while maintaining craftsmanship.
What you’ll do
Own backend services end-to-end: design, implement, test, deploy, observe, and iterate.
Lead architecture for new features and platforms (APIs, services, data flows, queues).
Build robust Go services (REST/gRPC) with strong concurrency, reliability, and clarity.
Design storage models and access patterns across Postgres (or similar), Redis caches, and object stores.
Drive operational excellence: CI/CD, zero-downtime deploys, canary/blue-green, rollbacks.
Make systems fast and cost-efficient via profiling (pprof), tracing, and capacity planning (P50/P95/P99).
Champion security-by-default (authn/z, JWT/OAuth2, secrets, least privilege) and observability (logs/metrics/traces).
Use AI tools (e.g., ChatGPT, Copilot) to draft code/tests/migrations, generate scaffolding, and accelerate root-cause analysis—while upholding code quality.
Mentor engineers; review designs and PRs with empathy and high standards.
What you’ll bring
5–8+ years building production services; 3+ years with Go in performance-sensitive systems.
Strong system design skills: domain modeling, API boundaries, microservice vs. modular monolith trade-offs.
Deep understanding of deployment and runtime efficiency: containers (Docker), orchestration (Kubernetes or equivalents), CI/CD, build pipelines, and runtime tuning.
Proficiency with transactions and data integrity; comfortable with migrations (Atlas, Flyway, Liquibase, or similar).
Experience with gRPC/REST, streaming or async workloads (Kafka/NATS/SQS), and idempotent processing.
Practical observability: Prometheus/Grafana, OpenTelemetry, structured logging.
Solid testing discipline: unit, integration (testcontainers), contract tests; familiarity with feature flags.
Comfort using AI tooling responsibly to speed up development without sacrificing maintainability.
Nice to have
Distributed systems patterns (sagas, outbox, CQRS), rate limiting, and backpressure.
Edge/CDN and web security basics (CSP, mTLS, WAF, Cloudflare).
Experience with cost optimization and performance budgets in cloud environments.
Hands-on with Railway/Heroku/Vercel or AWS/GCP/Azure primitives.
How we work
Small, senior team with high ownership and strong code review culture.
Pragmatic processes: ADRs for key decisions, lightweight RFCs, automated checks in CI.
“Measure first” mindset: we ship, observe, and iterate quickly.