Senior Backend Engineer, Core APIs (SRE Focus)

This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Senior Backend Engineer, Core APIs (SRE Focus) based in Switzerland.

This is a senior engineering role focused on building and operating highly reliable backend systems at significant <scale.You>’ll develop core APIs and real-time data services where performance, availability, latency, and cost are critical design considerations.The role combines hands-on backend engineering with strong Site Reliability Engineering ownership in <production.You>’ll define and monitor service objectives, improve observability, automate operational work, and help the platform scale safely as demand <grows.You>’ll take ownership of systems throughout their lifecycle, from technical design and implementation through deployment, incident response, and continuous optimization.Working within a fully remote, globally distributed team, you’ll collaborate asynchronously while contributing to engineering standards and mentoring other developers.This is an opportunity to solve complex distributed-systems challenges while helping build technology that protects businesses and users from online fraud.

Accountabilities

• Design, develop, and optimize highly performant backend services for real-time data processing and web APIs, balancing reliability, latency, scalability, and infrastructure cost.
• Define and own SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets for core API services, using reliability data to guide engineering and delivery decisions.
• Build and maintain effective observability through meaningful metrics, structured logging, distributed tracing, dashboards, and actionable alerts.
• Participate in an equitable on-call rotation, respond effectively to production incidents, mitigate customer impact, and lead blameless post-incident reviews.
• Automate repetitive operational processes and follow through on incident action items to reduce operational toil and prevent recurring failures.
• Conduct capacity planning, load testing, performance analysis, and tuning to ensure systems can scale ahead of demand.
• Investigate complex production and product issues by developing hypotheses, running experiments, analyzing results, and translating findings into engineering improvements.
• Integrate backend components with other services and collaborate with cross-functional teams to maintain performance, scalability, and reliability across the platform.
• Contribute to a data-driven, reliability-focused engineering culture by sharing best practices and improving development and operational processes.
• Mentor other engineers and support the continued growth of technical skills, engineering judgment, and operational excellence across the team.

Requirements

• 5+ years of backend software engineering experience, including substantial experience operating production systems that you have helped build.
• Demonstrated experience with formal SRE practices, including error budgets, capacity planning, production readiness reviews, or fault-injection and resilience testing.
• Strong hands-on experience with Go and/or Node.js, with the flexibility and willingness to learn the other technology.
• Proven ability to design, develop, and maintain scalable backend systems, APIs, microservices, and real-time data-processing services.
• Practical experience running production workloads with Docker and Kubernetes or comparable containerization and orchestration technologies.
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code tools such as Terraform or AWS CloudFormation.
• Working knowledge of observability platforms such as Datadog, including service instrumentation, monitoring, logging, tracing, dashboards, and alerting.
• Experience participating in production on-call rotations, troubleshooting live incidents, mitigating impact, and conducting post-incident analysis.
• Strong SQL skills and experience working with databases or data stores such as DynamoDB, Redis, or Elasticsearch.
• Familiarity with Git, shell scripting, IDEs, CI/CD pipelines, and standard software engineering practices.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems, scalability, reliability, and performance engineering.
• Excellent English communication skills and the ability to collaborate effectively within a globally distributed, remote-first environment.
• Ability to work independently, take ownership of complex problems, and collaborate effectively across teams.
• Strong interest in mentoring engineers and helping raise technical standards across the organization.
• A degree in Computer Science or a related discipline is welcome but equivalent professional experience is also valued.
• Experience with analytical platforms such as ClickHouse, Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, or Databricks is an advantage.
• Experience with performance profiling and cost optimization for high-throughput cloud workloads is a plus.
• Experience contributing to large open-source projects and working asynchronously across international teams is beneficial.
• Experience with both Node.js and Go in backend environments, as well as knowledge of internet security and privacy mechanisms, is highly valued.

Benefits

• US compensation reference: $150,000–$200,000 in cash compensation for US-based employees; compensation ranges vary according to hiring location.
• Fully remote working environment with the ability to work from a wide range of countries, subject to local regulatory and security requirements.
• Opportunity to work on high-scale backend and fraud-detection infrastructure with meaningful reliability and performance challenges.
• Exposure to modern technologies including Go, Node.js, TypeScript, AWS, Terraform, Docker, Kubernetes, Datadog, ClickHouse, and dbt.
• Flexible, globally distributed work environment designed around remote collaboration and asynchronous communication.
• Opportunities for continuous technical development, experimentation, and knowledge sharing.
• Strong emphasis on engineering ownership, reliability, mentorship, and professional growth.
• Inclusive workplace that values diverse perspectives, experiences, and cultural backgrounds.
• Visa sponsorship is not provided; employees must be authorized to work from their home location.
• Country-specific employment requirements and compensation structures may apply outside the United States.