Senior Backend Engineer
HackerRank6 months ago
Responsibilities
- Architect, design, and lead implementation of complex backend systems and services at scale.
- Define technical strategy and make decisions about system design, technology choices, and long-term architecture.
- Own the reliability and performance of critical backend services, including SLOs, monitoring, and incident response practices.
- Design scalable API frameworks and data models for product teams and external integrations.
- Lead cross-functional technical initiatives involving frontend, infrastructure, product, and design stakeholders.
- Drive large-scale refactoring and modernization of legacy systems.
- Mentor engineers through design reviews, code reviews, and hands-on technical guidance.
- Contribute to engineering-wide standards, tooling, code quality, and developer productivity.
- Evaluate AI tooling, APIs, and integration patterns based on cost, latency, reliability, and security considerations.
Requirements
- 3–6 years of experience building and operating production backend systems at scale.
- Expertise in at least one modern backend language, such as Python, Ruby, Go, Java, or Node.js.
- Experience designing distributed systems and making architectural decisions involving service decomposition, data consistency, fault tolerance, and observability.
- Deep expertise with relational databases including PostgreSQL and MySQL, as well as NoSQL stores, schema design, query optimization, and data modeling.
- Knowledge of caching strategies, asynchronous messaging, and event-driven architectures using technologies such as Redis, Memcached, Kafka, and RabbitMQ.
- Hands-on experience with Docker, Kubernetes, CI/CD pipelines, and infrastructure-as-code practices.
- Track record of leading technical projects from ambiguous problem statements through production delivery.
- Hands-on proficiency with AI-powered development tools such as GitHub Copilot, Cursor, and Claude Code.
- Working knowledge of LLMs, agentic AI systems, context management, tool use, and AI integration decisions.
- Understanding of transformer architectures, embedding models, inference optimization, RAG patterns, fine-tuning, prompt engineering, and evaluation methodologies.
- Preferred experience with systems serving millions of concurrent users, strict latency and availability requirements, cloud platforms such as AWS, GCP, or Azure, platform APIs, SDKs, developer tools, RFC processes, architecture review boards, or engineering culture improvements.
Tech Stack
Apache KafkaAWSAzureDockerGoGoogle Cloud PlatformJavaKubernetesMySQLNode.jsPostgreSQLPythonRabbitMQRedisRuby
Categories
About HackerRank
HackerRank builds a developer skills assessment and technical interview platform used by recruiters and hiring managers to evaluate engineers via coding tests, take-home challenges, and pair-programming sessions. It sells its software to enterprises on a subscription basis and maintains a large developer practice community; the privately held company was founded in 2012, is headquartered in Santa Clara, and counts organizations such as OpenAI, NVIDIA, and Amazon among its customers.