Senior Backend Software EngineerAbout the TeamThe Software Engineering team builds and operates the backend systems that deliver Swish's data products to clients. The team's work spans high-traffic APIs and microservices, data stream processing with Kafka, developer tooling such as SDKs and CLIs, database optimization, observability, and improvements to Kubernetes workloads and cloud costs. We partner closely with infrastructure, data engineering, data science, and product teams to keep these services reliable as demand grows. We're looking for a hands-on Senior engineer who can independently take technical ownership of core backend products, drive work across team boundaries, and help the team make sound architecture and engineering decisions.
Responsibilities- Serve as the technical lead and owner for core backend products, guiding work from design through implementation and production operation
- Design and improve high-traffic, client-facing APIs and microservices, with attention to latency, availability, and correctness
- Identify performance and scalability bottlenecks across applications, databases, and service dependencies, and deliver improvements supported by production measurements
- Develop services that process real-time and distributed data, working with upstream teams to understand dependencies and failure modes
- Create and review architecture designs, documenting important tradeoffs and explaining them to technical and nontechnical partners
- Review code, provide constructive feedback, and improve coding standards, testing practices, and maintainability
- Improve observability and automation so engineers can detect problems, investigate incidents, and operate services effectively
- Contribute to shared tooling, Kubernetes workload optimization, and cloud efficiency in partnership with the teams responsible for those systems
Requirements- Minimum of 5 years of production software engineering experience, including demonstrated technical leadership and ownership of backend systems
- Hands-on production experience with Node.js and Python
- Hands-on production experience with relational and non-relational databases
- Strong understanding of high-traffic APIs, distributed services, and the networking and dependencies that affect their behavior
- Experience making engineering decisions that improve reliability, high availability, performance, and maintainability
- Ability to independently scope ambiguous technical problems, assess tradeoffs, coordinate dependencies, and drive implementation through production rollout
- Strong communication skills with technical and nontechnical stakeholders
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Software Engineering, or equivalent relevant experience
Preferred- Production experience with Kafka or comparable stream-processing systems
- Production experience with Docker and Kubernetes
- Experience building and operating systems at global scale, including low-latency distributed data systems
- Experience developing, deploying, and maintaining business-critical applications
- Experience with observability platforms and CI/CD tooling
- Interest or experience in Go
- Familiarity with sports data
Base Salary: Starting at $150,000 to DOE
