BACKEND SOFTWARE ENGINEER JOB DESCRIPTION

A Backend Engineer is someone who owns a feature from its first design sketch to its first production alert. That ownership - of architecture decisions, test coverage, and deployment sequencing - is what separates this role from a generalist contributor. Backend engineers in software product companies operate across distributed systems at scale, where a poor database schema or an untested API contract can degrade service for tens of millions of concurrent users. The RESTful API surface and the cloud infrastructure layer are this role's primary terrain, not the browser.

As the Backend Software Engineer, you will own the design, implementation, and production health of server-side systems that power both internal tooling and customer-facing products, ensuring reliability and throughput at scale. You will work within a cross-functional product engineering team, partnering with frontend engineers and product managers to translate requirements into deployable, observable software.

Career Impact: Owning architecture decisions on distributed systems serving large user bases builds the kind of platform-engineering credibility that opens doors to staff and principal engineer tracks.

Business Impact: The APIs and infrastructure you ship directly determine whether product teams can move fast or grind to a halt waiting on unstable backends.

Growth Opportunity: Exposure to CI/CD tooling, cloud-native platform work, and large-scale traffic modeling expands your scope toward platform engineering and developer productivity - one of the fastest-growing seniority paths in the industry.

• Design and implement server-side APIs supporting both internal services and external product integrations.
• Architect database schemas and data access patterns for high-throughput, distributed environments.
• Review technical design proposals and code submissions to maintain standards across multiple concurrent projects.
• Diagnose, debug, and resolve defects across staging and production environments to minimize service disruption.
• Collaborate with product and frontend engineers to translate feature requirements into backend specifications.
• Build and maintain automated testing frameworks that validate correctness and surface regressions before deployment.
• Mentor fellow engineers through design reviews and pair programming, raising team-wide engineering capability.
• Monitor application observability signals - latency, error rates, throughput - and act on anomalies proactively.

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or equivalent work experience.
• 3 or more years of professional backend software development experience, with demonstrated ownership of production systems.
• Proficiency in at least one backend language such as Python, Ruby, Java, Go, or C++, applied in a production web context.
• Solid understanding of RESTful API design principles and the trade-offs involved in API versioning and contract management.
• Experience working with relational and non-relational databases, including schema design and query optimization for high-volume workloads.
• Hands-on experience deploying and operating applications on a major cloud platform, with working knowledge of compute, storage, and networking primitives.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to document technical decisions for asynchronous review.
• Demonstrated ability to write and maintain automated tests covering unit, integration, and regression scenarios.

• Experience building or contributing to internal developer tooling, CI/CD pipelines, or platform infrastructure rather than exclusively product features.
• Familiarity with large-scale data processing frameworks or stream-processing concepts applied in pre-production traffic modeling.
• Prior involvement in technical interviewing, design review processes, or structured mentorship programs within an engineering organization.
• Exposure to statistical modeling or machine learning techniques in a software engineering context, such as traffic simulation or anomaly detection.

• API uptime and error rate, measured against defined SLA thresholds for production services.
• Mean time to resolve production incidents attributed to backend defects or regressions.
• Test coverage percentage across owned services, tracked per release cycle.
• Deployment frequency and rollback rate, reflecting the stability of release processes the engineer owns.
• Code review turnaround time, indicating contribution to team velocity beyond personal output.
• Typical tools: version control and CI/CD (commonly Git, GitHub Actions or Jenkins); cloud platforms (commonly AWS or Azure); observability (commonly Datadog or equivalent).

• Base Salary Range: $130,000 to $175,000 annually, depending on seniority and location
• Bonus: Annual performance bonus, typically 8 to 12% of base salary
• Equity: Stock options or RSUs common at product-stage technology companies
• Health Benefits: Medical, dental, and vision coverage; employer contribution varies by company size
• PTO: 15 to 20 days annually; many technology employers offer flexible or unlimited PTO
• Common Perks: Remote or hybrid work flexibility, home office stipend, learning and development budget

Figures are estimates based on general US market benchmarks and may be outdated. Adjust based on location, company size, and seniority level.

Work authorization in the United States is required for this position. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected under applicable federal, state, or local law. Reasonable accommodations are available to individuals with disabilities throughout the hiring process upon request. Employment is contingent on the successful completion of a background check.

The Backend Software Engineer owns the design, implementation, and delivery of software across the Scribd and SlideShare properties, building applications with testability, scalability, and observability in mind for a product serving 250 million monthly users. Working closely with product and front-end engineers, the Backend Software Engineer shapes application architecture and development environment improvements that directly expand team velocity and product direction.

Key Responsibilities

• Implement integrations between the Scribd and SlideShare properties.
• Work closely with product and front-end engineers to implement features.
• Improve a product used by 250 million people every month.
• Help define the application architecture to improve team velocity.
• Simplify and streamline the current development environment.
• Have a broad impact on the future and direction of the product.

Required Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience coding in modern consumer-facing web applications.
• Proficiency with Ruby on Rails and RESTful API design.
• Strong experience working with AWS and large-scale distributed systems.
• Knowledge of database design best practices for high-throughput applications.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills.
• A focus on creating value for customers.

Embedded within the product and customer-facing support teams, the Backend Software Developer delivers and maintains APIs for internal and external web systems integrated with major sales, construction management, and financial software. Working closely with the product team, the Backend Software Developer advances web-based solutions using Python and Azure-based toolchains to keep cross-functional deployments coordinated and coding standards consistent across projects.

Core Functions

• Review and refine software design proposals.
• Implement design and logic for interfaces delivered over web technologies.
• Work with the product team to detail out design requirements for new products and features.
• Maintain coding standards across multiple projects.
• Diagnose, debug, and correct defects.
• Document implementations.

Qualifications & Experience

• 3 to 5 years of professional software development experience.
• Experience developing web-based solutions using Python 3 and one or more web development frameworks.
• Deep understanding of web standards, infrastructure, and cloud hosting offerings.
• Experience with other web technologies and languages such as JavaScript and SQL.
• Strong debugging skills.
• Excellent written and spoken English communication skills.

Reporting to the engineering leadership team, the Backend Software Engineer builds tooling and cloud native platforms that help engineering teams measure velocity, replicate production traffic in pre-production environments, and resolve pain points across the development, test, and release process. Partnering with engineers across the organization, this work enables faster delivery of high-quality code by designing advanced automated testing frameworks and solving continuous integration and delivery challenges at scale.

Primary Duties

• Focus on building tools and infrastructure to enable other software engineers to ship high-quality code more quickly.
• Design and build tooling and infrastructure to help engineering teams measure and increase their velocity.
• Develop tools to understand, model, and replicate production traffic patterns in pre-production environments.
• Identify pain points in the development, test, and release process and find scalable ways to address them.
• Design and build advanced automated testing frameworks.
• Develop cloud native platforms to solve environment, traffic routing, and continuous integration and delivery problems.

Education & Experience

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 2 or more years of coding experience in C, C++, Java, Golang, or Python.
• Experience in data structures, algorithms, and software design.
• Familiarity with big data processing technologies such as Spark, Flink, or HDFS.
• Experience with web services, including Spring, Ajax, Vue, or React.
• Passion for automation, optimization, and building tools for other engineers.