Hiring Backend Engineers: The Complete Guide

# Backend Engineer

**Location:** Austin, TX (Hybrid) · **Employment Type:** Full-time · **Level:** Mid-Senior

## About [Company]

[Company] is building the next generation of workflow automation for operations teams. We help mid-market companies eliminate manual data entry and streamline their business processes through intelligent APIs and integrations.

Our platform processes over 25 million API requests daily, serving 1,500+ customers including logistics companies, healthcare providers, and e-commerce platforms. We maintain 99.9% uptime and handle real-time data synchronization across dozens of third-party systems.

**Why join [Company]?**

- Work on systems processing 25M+ API requests daily
- Join an 85-person team with a strong engineering culture
- Series B funded ($52M from Accel and Index Ventures)
- Competitive compensation with meaningful equity
- Engineering-led culture where technical decisions are made by engineers

## The Role

We're looking for a Backend Engineer to join our Core Platform team. You'll build and scale the APIs that power our automation engine—from designing new endpoints to optimizing database queries that run millions of times per day.

The ideal candidate has experience building production systems at scale, cares deeply about reliability and performance, and enjoys owning services end-to-end. You'll work closely with our frontend team, DevOps, and product managers to deliver features that customers depend on.

This role is **80% backend, 20% infrastructure**. You'll spend most of your time writing application code, but you'll also have opportunities to improve our deployment pipeline and monitoring systems.

## What You'll Work On

### First 30 Days
- Get familiar with our codebase, architecture, and deployment process
- Ship your first feature (we'll pair you with a buddy)
- Join on-call shadow rotation to understand our systems

### First 90 Days
- Own a major feature from design to production
- Contribute to architectural discussions
- Start reviewing code and providing feedback

### First Year
- Lead technical initiatives across multiple services
- Mentor junior engineers
- Shape our technical roadmap

## Objectives of This Role

- Build reliable, scalable APIs that handle 500+ requests per second
- Improve system performance and maintain our 99.9% uptime SLA
- Design database schemas and optimize queries for our growing data volume
- Contribute to our event-driven architecture and message queue systems
- Mentor junior engineers and participate in architecture decisions
- Reduce operational burden through automation and better tooling

## Responsibilities

**Core Development (70%)**
- Design and implement RESTful APIs using Node.js and TypeScript
- Write and optimize PostgreSQL queries, including complex joins and indexing strategies
- Build background job processors using Redis and Bull queues
- Implement event-driven features using our message queue infrastructure
- Write comprehensive tests (unit, integration, and load tests)
- Document technical decisions and maintain runbooks for critical systems

**Collaboration (20%)**
- Collaborate with frontend engineers on API contracts and data requirements
- Work with product managers to understand requirements and propose solutions
- Review pull requests and provide constructive feedback to teammates
- Participate in design reviews and architecture discussions

**Operations (10%)**
- Debug production issues and participate in on-call rotation (1 week every 6 weeks)
- Improve monitoring and alerting for your services
- Contribute to incident post-mortems and prevention measures
- Maintain and improve deployment pipelines

## Required Skills and Qualifications

**Technical Skills**
- 4+ years of professional backend development experience
- Strong proficiency with Node.js/TypeScript or similar backend languages (Python, Go, Java)
- Expert-level SQL skills including query optimization and database design
- Experience designing and maintaining RESTful APIs at scale
- Familiarity with message queues (Redis, RabbitMQ, or Kafka)
- Understanding of caching strategies and their trade-offs
- Experience with containerization (Docker) and basic Kubernetes concepts
- Comfortable with on-call responsibilities and incident response

**Soft Skills**
- Strong written and verbal communication
- Ability to break down complex problems into manageable pieces
- Collaborative mindset and willingness to help teammates
- Self-directed with ability to work independently

## Preferred Skills and Qualifications

- Experience with event-driven architectures
- Familiarity with GraphQL
- Background in B2B SaaS or workflow automation
- Experience with observability tools (Datadog, New Relic, or similar)
- Contributions to open-source projects
- Experience operating services handling 10M+ requests/day
- Understanding of security best practices (OWASP, secure coding)
- Experience with Terraform or other infrastructure-as-code tools

## Tech Stack

**Languages & Frameworks:**
- Node.js with TypeScript (primary)
- Python for data pipelines and scripts
- Express.js for API server

**Databases & Storage:**
- PostgreSQL (primary relational database)
- Redis for caching, queues, and rate limiting
- Elasticsearch for search and analytics
- S3 for file storage

**Message Queues & Events:**
- Bull (Redis-based job queues)
- Amazon SQS for async processing
- Event-driven architecture for real-time features

**Infrastructure:**
- AWS (ECS, RDS, Lambda, S3, CloudWatch)
- Terraform for infrastructure as code
- Docker for containerization
- Kubernetes (EKS) for orchestration

**CI/CD & Monitoring:**
- GitHub Actions for CI/CD
- ArgoCD for GitOps deployments
- Datadog for monitoring and APM
- PagerDuty for alerting
- Sentry for error tracking

## Compensation and Benefits

**Salary:** $140,000 - $185,000 (based on experience and location)

**Equity:** 0.04% - 0.12% (4-year vest, 1-year cliff)

**Benefits:**

*Health & Wellness*
- Medical, dental, and vision insurance (100% covered for employees, 75% for dependents)
- $100/month wellness stipend
- Mental health support through Modern Health

*Time Off*
- Unlimited PTO with 15-day minimum encouraged
- 11 paid company holidays
- 16 weeks paid parental leave
- Flexible sick leave policy

*Professional Development*
- $3,000 annual learning and development budget
- Conference attendance (1-2 per year)
- Internal tech talks and knowledge sharing

*Financial*
- 401(k) with 4% company match
- Equity refresh grants annually
- On-call compensation: $500/week when primary on-call

*Workspace*
- $1,500 home office setup allowance
- Flexible hybrid work (2 days in Austin office)
- MacBook Pro and equipment of your choice

## Engineering Culture

**How we work:**
- Two-week sprints with reasonable deadlines
- Engineers own their projects end-to-end
- Blameless post-mortems after incidents
- Code review required for all changes
- On-call rotation shared across the team

**What we value:**
- Reliability over speed (but we still move fast)
- Clear communication and documentation
- Continuous improvement of our systems
- Learning from failures, not punishing them
- Work-life balance (we don't glorify crunch)

## Interview Process

Our interview process typically takes 2-3 weeks. We provide feedback at every stage.

- **Step 1: Recruiter Screen** (30 min)
  We'll discuss your background, interests, and answer your questions about the role.

- **Step 2: Technical Screen** (60 min)
  A conversation about backend fundamentals, past projects, and system ownership with an engineer.

- **Step 3: System Design** (60 min)
  Design a rate-limiting service or similar distributed system with our engineers. No whiteboard coding—we'll discuss approaches and trade-offs.

- **Step 4: Coding Session** (90 min)
  Build a small API endpoint in your preferred language. We focus on code quality, testing, and practical skills. No LeetCode puzzles.

- **Step 5: Team Interviews** (2 x 30 min)
  Meet potential teammates and discuss collaboration, communication, and working style.

- **Step 6: Hiring Manager** (30 min)
  Discuss career goals, growth opportunities, and next steps.

We pay $250 for take-home exercises over 3 hours. We respect your time.

## How to Apply

Submit your resume and optionally include:
- Link to your GitHub or GitLab profile
- Personal blog or technical writing
- Description of a production system you're proud of
- Anything else that shows your backend engineering skills

We review every application and respond within 5 business days.

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*[Company] is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. We encourage applications from candidates who may not meet 100% of the qualifications—research shows underrepresented groups are less likely to apply unless they meet every requirement. If you're excited about this role, we want to hear from you.*