Senior Back End Developer

Senior Backed Engineer

Remote, Preferred Locations: Belmont, CA; Austin, TX

Hybrid, Client site travel or onsite 1 or 2 times a month locally

About the Role

B5 Recruiting is recruiting for a large data and analytics firm seeking a Senior Backend Engineer to help design, build, and support scalable backend systems for its modern, data-driven software platform. This role is focused on production backend engineering, data architecture, API development, distributed processing, and operational reliability. The ideal candidate has strong experience building backend services, managing large-scale data flows, improving database performance, and supporting business-critical systems in production. Candidates should also be comfortable working with a platform that includes AI-enabled capabilities such as search, embeddings, model integrations, and related data workflows.

What You’ll Work On

You will help improve the backend platform supporting data ingestion, processing, APIs, search, and production application workflows.

Key areas of focus include:

• Building and maintaining reliable backend services
• Improving data ingestion and processing workflows
• Designing scalable database models, indexes, and query patterns
• Supporting API layers used by frontend and product teams
• Building and maintaining service-to-service data access patterns
• Improving system performance, reliability, and observability
• Supporting AI-related workflows, including embeddings, vector-based search, provider integrations, evaluation hooks, and metadata management
• Improving infrastructure, deployment, testing, and operational practices
• Responsibilities
• Own backend services from initial design through deployment and production support
• Build and improve APIs with a focus on performance, scalability, security, and maintainability
• Design and maintain backend service contracts and data access patterns
• Improve database performance through data modeling, indexing, aggregation pipeline optimization, query tuning, and latency reduction
• Build reliable event-driven and asynchronous processing workflows
• Implement retries, idempotency, failure handling, dead-letter queues, rate limiting, and backpressure
• Improve observability through logging, metrics, tracing, dashboards, alerts, and runbooks
• Partner with product, frontend, design, and engineering teams to deliver features safely and efficiently
• Improve testing, code quality, CI/CD practices, and engineering standards
• Mentor other engineers and contribute to architecture and technical decision-making
• Required Skills and Experience
• Strong experience building and maintaining backend services in production
• Strong experience with API development, including GraphQL or similar API patterns
• Experience with schema design, resolvers, authorization, pagination, batching, caching, and API performance optimization
• Strong experience with MongoDB or similar document-oriented databases
• Hands-on experience with MongoDB data modeling, indexing, aggregation pipelines, query optimization, and performance tuning
• Strong proficiency with Node.js, JavaScript, and/or TypeScript
• Strong proficiency with Python for services, jobs, automation, data workflows, or internal tooling
• Experience building cloud-based backend systems, preferably within AWS
• Experience with serverless, event-driven, or asynchronous architectures
• Experience with queues, object storage, event buses, cloud functions, monitoring tools, and API gateways
• Experience supporting high-traffic, business-critical, or production-scale systems
• Understanding of backend performance patterns, including caching, asynchronous processing, connection management, and data access optimization
• Experience with Infrastructure as Code, preferably Terraform
• Experience with unit, integration, and contract testing
• Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines and modern deployment workflows
• Strong debugging, monitoring, incident response, and production support skills
• Ability to work effectively within a distributed team environment
• Infrastructure and Platform Experience

Relevant experience may include:

AWS or similar cloud platforms

• Serverless compute
• Messaging and event-driven systems
• Object storage
• Monitoring and alerting tools
• API gateway patterns
• Infrastructure as Code
• IAM, networking, secrets management, and repeatable environments
• Private networking patterns
• Containerized workloads or Kubernetes environments
• AI and Modern Platform Experience
• This role supports a platform with AI-enabled functionality. Candidates do not need to be machine learning researchers, but they should understand how AI-powered software features are integrated, operated, and supported in production.

Relevant experience may include:

• Embeddings and vector-based search concepts
• Integrating with external AI, LLM, or embedding providers
• Designing abstractions around third-party providers
• Handling timeouts, retries, fallbacks, and rate limits
• Understanding cost, latency, quality, and relevance tradeoffs
• Supporting evaluation processes, regression checks, observability, guardrails, and auditability
• Using AI development tools to improve engineering speed, testing, quality, or maintainability
• Nice to Have
• Experience with very high-throughput backend systems
• Experience tuning concurrency, connection pools, and service latency
• Experience with search, analytics, saved views, filters, or precomputed data patterns
• Experience with database scaling, sharding, or large data sets
• Experience with multi-region or compliance-conscious architectures
• Experience refactoring legacy systems or consolidating services
• Experience improving cloud cost, reliability, and operational efficiency

Additional Info:

Remote (U.S.-based) with ~25% travel

• High-impact role with strong growth visibility