SDE III Backend

Problems to Solve

• Establishing clear service boundaries and contracts for shared components to minimize coupling and integration friction.
• Ensuring multi-tenant isolation, quotas, and fairness without compromising latency or throughput.
• Achieving reliability and scalability under bursty workloads, with predictable rollouts and secure migrations.
• Maintaining data correctness and privacy through PII masking, auditability, and least-privileged access.
• Providing cost visibility and controls for shared services, including usage-based accounting and guardrails.
• Enhancing developer experience (DX) through paved roads, SDKs/clients, golden examples, and comprehensive documentation.
• Implementing pragmatic AI add-ons (e.g., relevance ranking, content policy checks, routing) with human-in-the-loop oversight and audit trails.
• Direct impact on core building blocks utilized by every product team.
• Part of an engineering culture that prioritizes clarity, correctness, and predictable delivery.
• Opportunities for technical leadership, mentorship, and setting scalable standards.
 

Responsibility

• End-to-end ownership of one or more platform services, including design, coding, code reviews, testing, deployment, and operational health (SLOs, alerts, on-call rotation).
• Defining and evolving service APIs/SDKs, tenancy models, data schemas, and migration plans.
• Driving non-functional excellence: establishing performance baselines, conducting load testing, implementing caching, rate-limiting, back-pressure, retries/idempotency, and graceful degradation.
• Partnering with SRE/DevOps to develop CI/CD pipelines with progressive delivery, safe rollbacks, and infrastructure as code.
• Embedding security-by-design principles: authentication/authorization, secrets management, audit trails, input validation, and privacy controls.
• Leading technical discovery for new capabilities (e.g., workflow engine hooks, rules evaluation at scale, search relevance, LLM gateway safety filters).
• Mentoring engineers, elevating design rigor, reviews, and documentation standards.
• Measuring and improving cost per request, latency percentiles, success rate, and developer adoption.
 

Requirements

• 5–8 years of backend experience, with at least 2–3 years owning production services at scale.
• Proficiency in Java + Spring (or equivalent), strong understanding of data structures, concurrency, and distributed systems.
• Experience building and evolving multi-tenant or widely-shared services with clear APIs/SLAs.
• Demonstrated ownership of non-functional requirements (NFRs): setting baselines, load-testing, performance tuning, and improving SLOs.
• Hands-on experience with relational databases, caching, queues/streams, and event-driven patterns.
• Solid CI/CD practices: automated tests, progressive delivery, rollback discipline, and Infrastructure as Code (IaC).
• Strong understanding of security fundamentals: least privilege, input validation, secrets management, and auditing.
• Excellent design communication skills; mentorship experience and effective cross-team collaboration.
 
Good-to-Have
• Experience with platformization: paved roads, SDKs, golden templates, migration toolkits.
• Exposure to search/indexing, rules engines, workflow orchestration, or policy as code.
• Practical experience with cost governance in shared services (usage metering, quotas, allocation).
• Experience with LLM/AI integration via a gateway or safety/routing layer.
• Prior work on notifications, authentication/authorization, audit, or globalization/timezone concerns.