Lead Backend Engineer

About Client:

About the Role

Responsibilities

• Lead the design and development of backend services using Go.
• Own core backend work related to real time communication capabilities, including WebRTC, LiveKit, SFU architectures, or comparable media platforms.
• Architect and implement cloud based, microservice oriented systems that are reliable, observable, secure, and maintainable.
• Design service to service communication patterns, API contracts, event flows, and integration points between distributed services.
• Develop and maintain data schemas, domain models, persistence strategies, and data access patterns across backend systems.
• Build backend infrastructure for authentication, authorization, role based access control, and customer onboarding workflows.
• Build event driven systems using Apache Kafka or comparable messaging technologies.
• Partner directly with computer vision, NLP, AI/ML, frontend, DevOps, and security stakeholders to translate requirements into well structured backend architecture.
• Review code, mentor engineers, establish engineering standards, and help the team make sound technical tradeoffs.
• Improve system performance, scalability, reliability, and debuggability across production services.

Required Qualifications

• 7+ years of professional backend or systems engineering experience.
• Strong proficiency in Go, C++, Java, Rust, or a similar object oriented or lower level programming language.
• Experience designing and operating cloud based architectures on AWS, Azure, GCP, or similar cloud platforms.
• Experience working on or with AI/ML platforms and communicating with AI/ML teams.
• Strong understanding of microservice architecture, service boundaries, API design, inter service communication, and distributed systems tradeoffs.
• Extensive experience with data modeling, schema design, relational and/or non relational databases, and long term data maintainability.
• Experience designing authentication and authorization systems, including role based access control.
• Experience leading technical projects, mentoring engineers, reviewing designs, and guiding implementation across a team.
• Strong debugging and performance analysis skills in production backend systems.
• Ability to communicate clearly with both technical and non technical stakeholders.

Preferred Qualifications

• Hands on experience with WebRTC, LiveKit, or other real time media streaming systems.
• Experience with Apache Kafka, event driven architectures, message queues, or stream processing systems.
• Experience building backend systems for real time collaboration.
• Experience with Kubernetes, Docker, infrastructure as code, CI/CD, and modern DevOps practices.
• Familiarity with secure software development practices, audit logging, secrets management, and least privilege access design.
• Experience leading data modeling efforts for large distributed backend systems.
• Experience working in regulated, government, defense, or enterprise security environments.
• Experience with observability tooling, including structured logging, metrics, tracing, and alerting.

Work Authorization and Clearance Eligibility

Benefits

• Health, dental, and vision benefits for eligible employees.
• Flexible work environment.
• Opportunity to work on advanced computer vision, natural language processing, AI, optimization, and backend infrastructure problems.
• High impact role with meaningful ownership over technical direction.
• Collaborative team environment with direct visibility into product and company strategy.