Senior Backend Engineer
HackerRank8 months ago
Base Salary
$190k - $220k/yr
Responsibilities
- Architect, design, and lead implementation of complex backend systems and services at scale.
- Define technical strategy, system design decisions, technology choices, and long-term architecture.
- Own reliability and performance for critical backend services, including SLOs, monitoring, and incident response practices.
- Design scalable API frameworks and data models for product teams and external integrations.
- Lead technical initiatives across 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 standards, tooling, code quality, and developer productivity.
- Develop AI-augmented workflows and evaluate AI tooling, APIs, and integration patterns.
Requirements
- 3–6 years of experience building and operating production backend systems at scale.
- Expertise in at least one of Python, Ruby, Go, Java, or Node.js, with strong software fundamentals.
- Experience designing distributed systems and making architectural decisions involving service decomposition, data consistency, fault tolerance, and observability.
- Deep expertise with PostgreSQL, MySQL, and NoSQL stores, including schema design, query optimization, and data modeling.
- Strong understanding of Redis or Memcached, Kafka or RabbitMQ, and event-driven architectures.
- Hands-on experience with Docker, Kubernetes, CI/CD pipelines, and infrastructure-as-code practices.
- Experience leading technical projects from ambiguous problem statements through production delivery.
- Hands-on proficiency with GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Claude Code, or comparable AI-powered development tools.
- Working knowledge of LLMs, agentic AI systems, transformer architectures, embedding models, inference optimization, RAG, fine-tuning, prompt engineering, and evaluation methodologies.
- Preferred experience includes systems serving millions of concurrent users, platform APIs or SDKs, cloud platforms, serverless architectures, managed services, cost optimization, RFC processes, architecture review boards, or engineering blog contributions.
Benefits
- Base salary is $190,000–$220,000, plus a target 10% annual bonus and equity through stock options.
- Comprehensive cash and non-cash benefits package.
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.