Senior Software Engineer, Backend

About Onebrief

Onebrief is collaboration and AI-powered workflow software designed specifically for military staffs. By transforming this work, Onebrief makes the staff as a whole superhuman - meaning faster, smarter, and more efficient.

We take ownership, seek excellence, and play to win with the seriousness and camaraderie of an Olympic team. Onebrief operates as an all-remote company, though many of our employees work alongside our customers at military commands around the world.

Founded in 2019 by a group of experienced planners, today, Onebrief’s team spans veterans from all forces and global organizations, and technologists from leading-edge software companies. We’ve raised $320m+ from top-tier investors, including Battery Ventures, General Catalyst, Sapphire Ventures, Insight Partners, and Human Capital, and today, Onebrief is valued at $2.15B. With this continued growth, Onebrief is able to make an impact where it matters most.

About The Role

We’re hiring Senior Software Engineer, Backend to help design, build, and operate the core systems of our platform. This is a hands-on engineering role with a focus on performance, reliability, and operational excellence. Our backend is built on modern languages, frameworks, and cloud-native infrastructure. We value strong problem-solving skills and sound engineering judgment over mastery of any one technology.

You’ll work on high-impact systems including (but not limited to) our core backend services, database, monitoring, and metrics pipelines. Expect to tackle challenges in scaling, performance, data modeling, fault tolerance, observability, and disaster recovery. You’ll help shape architecture and contribute to operational and long term strategy.

If you enjoy thinking about trade-offs, working across the stack, and solving problems that keep production systems healthy under real-world conditions, you’ll thrive here.

What You'll Do

• Design, build, and maintain backend services that power mission-critical platform functions within your team’s scope
• Optimize data models and system performance to improve scalability, reliability, and maintainability
• Work across APIs, databases, and deployment systems to deliver cohesive, production-ready solutions
• Diagnose and resolve performance, scalability, and reliability issues in production
• Contribute to architecture discussions and collaborate on high-availability system design
• Implement and improve monitoring, alerting, and operational practices
• Balance long-term code quality with pragmatic delivery to meet team goals

What We Look For

• 6+ years of experience in backend software development, with strong proficiency in one or more backend languages (e.g., Node.js, Python, Java, Go)
• Deep understanding of scalable API design (REST, GraphQL, gRPC), data modeling, distributed systems, and performance/reliability best practices
• Hands-on experience with relational and/or non-relational databases, containerization, and cloud infrastructure (Docker, Kubernetes, AWS/GCP/Azure)
• Experience owning and delivering complex, well-scoped backend initiatives within a team
• Strong architectural judgment within team boundaries and ability to contribute meaningfully to system design discussions
• Ability to recognize bottlenecks and adjust course when needed; willingness to escalate when complexity expands significantly beyond team scope
• Experience collaborating across teams (i.e., product, frontend, and DevOps) to deliver high-quality, end-to-end solutions
• Experience operating in moderate ambiguity, maintaining steady execution and clear communication across PRs and design discussions
• Track record of delivering complex projects in fast-paced or demanding environments

Preferred Qualifications

• Background in mission-critical domains
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, and deployment workflows
• Prior experience driving architecture and system design decisions for complex, high-scale applications
• Knowledge of event-driven and service-oriented architectures (Kafka, Pub/Sub, microservices)
• Familiarity with observability stacks (logging, metrics, tracing) and incident response practices
• Experience with data sharding and logical data partitioning strategies
• Experience with message queues, streaming platforms, or event buses
• Experience working with security/compliance requirements (e.g., SOC2, FedRAMP, HIPAA)

Key skills/competency

• Backend Development
• Distributed Systems
• Scalable API Design
• Data Modeling
• Cloud Infrastructure
• Performance Optimization
• System Design
• Operational Excellence
• Containerization
• Observability