Senior Backend Engineer

Early Media

$125K — $150K *
Media
5 - 7 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 6+ years experience in distributed, production-grade backend systems.
  • Expertise in Java EE or Kotlin programming languages.
  • Strong background in building microservices with Kafka, Flink, or similar technologies.
  • Proficient in infrastructure management using AWS, GCP, or Azure.
  • Ability to communicate technical tradeoffs clearly to non-engineers.
  • Proven track record of making architectural decisions that impact multiple teams.

Responsibilities

  • Own the core backend architecture for Twist, its Analytics Engine, Prediction Engine, and Ecommerce system.
  • Develop and maintain data pipelines for the Analytics and Prediction Engines.
  • Implement effective logging, monitoring, and alerting systems.
  • Mentor and assess technical judgment within the engineering team.
  • Ensure systems are resilient and preemptively catch issues before they escalate.

Benefits

  • Flexible working arrangements.
  • Collaborative and innovative team environment.
  • Opportunity to work on a platform ecosystem built from the ground up.
  • Potential for career growth in a developing tech landscape.
Full Job Description
Senior Backend Engineer

The platform ecosystem behind Twist is being built from scratch - Twist, our streaming app; the Analytics Engine; and a Prediction Engine developed in partnership with our Data Science Lead. We're looking for a senior backend engineer to own the architecture underneath all three.

What you'll own
  • The core backend architecture that spans Twist, Analytics Engine, Prediction Engine, and our Ecommerce platform.
  • The pipes behind the Analytics Engine and Prediction Engine - starting from ingestion, sentiment analysis, dashboards, to campaign attribution.
  • Logging, monitoring, and alerting that catches problems before they become incidents.
  • The technical judgment of the engineers around you, through review and direct mentorship.


Must-haves
  • Ridiculously driven: you'd build this even if no one was watching.
  • 6+ years shipping and owning distributed, production-grade backend systems.
  • Expert in Java EE or Kotlin.
  • Experience building microservices in Java/Kotlin, with event-driven architecture and message queues (Kafka, Flink, or equivalent), exposed via REST and gRPC contracts.
  • Comfortable owning infrastructure on AWS/GCP/Azure with Docker and Kubernetes.
  • You've made architecture decisions that other teams had to live with, and you can own them.
  • You can explain a hard technical tradeoff to someone who doesn't write code.


Nice to Have
  • Media, streaming, or gig-economy background.
  • CDN and video streaming protocol experience (HLS, DASH).
  • Payment gateway integration work.
  • Real-time/streaming data processing.
  • Familiarity with compliance basics , such as KYC, anti-fraud, data privacy.
  • Protobuf/gRPC contract design across polyglot services.
  • Experience with JVM performance tuning and GC diagnostics.

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