Senior Backend Engineer - Node.js/TypeScript, Distributed Systems

Senior Backend Engineer - Node.js/TypeScript, Distributed Systems

Location:OH

This is a Node.js first environment, and Java heavy backgrounds without meaningful Node.js experience will not be sufficient. he manager is looking for stronger alignment in a few key areas:
Strong Node.js experience in addition to Java
Meaningful, recent Azure experience
Experience working with similar backend systems/platforms
Resumes that clearly and accurately demonstrate the candidate’s experience and work history
Several of the profiles reviewed so far have been more Java heavy, with limited Node.js and/or Azure experience. Please make sure these areas are being weighted heavily in your search and are clearly demonstrated in the candidate’s recent experience.
 

Job Description

About the Role

At Kroger Technology, we''re building the software that powers one of the largest retailers in the world. Every day, millions of customers rely on our digital experiences while hundreds of thousands of associates depend on our technology to efficiently fulfill orders and serve customers.
We''re looking for a Senior Backend Engineer to help build and scale the large-scale distributed systems behind our fulfillment platforms. This is a hands-on engineering role for someone who enjoys complex distributed systems problems, designs resilient cloud-native services, and can operate with a high degree of autonomy.
You''ll work alongside product managers, architects, engineering managers, and engineers on other teams to build highly available services operating at enterprise scale.
 

Technologies You''ll Work With

Node.js, TypeScript, Microsoft Azure, Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Azure Service Bus, Azure Functions, Cosmos DB, REST APIs, Docker, Kubernetes, Helm, GitHub Actions, OpenTelemetry, Dynatrace

Required Qualifications

6+ years of professional software engineering experience building backend applications.
Strong recent production experience with Node.js and TypeScript, including asynchronous patterns and runtime performance characteristics.
Experience designing and building large-scale distributed systems in production environments.
Deep understanding of microservice architecture and event-driven application design.
Hands-on experience building and operating asynchronous, message-based systems. You should be able to speak concretely about idempotency, out-of-order delivery, retry and dead-letter handling, and consumer lag, from systems you have run rather than read about.
Experience developing and maintaining RESTful APIs.
Experience with NoSQL databases, including partitioning and consistency tradeoffs.
Strong, recent hands-on experience building and operating production applications on Microsoft Azure.
Experience with containerized applications using Docker and Kubernetes.
Strong understanding of CI/CD pipelines and modern DevOps practices.
Ability to diagnose problems from production telemetry: logs, traces, and metrics, rather than only from local reproduction.
Ability to work across team boundaries. This platform depends on systems owned by other teams, and you will need to go get answers rather than wait for them.
Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
 

Preferred Qualifications

Experience with Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS).
Experience with Azure Service Bus, Kafka, or similar messaging technologies, including topics, subscriptions, and filtering.
Experience with Cosmos DB or a comparable partitioned NoSQL store.
NestJS or a comparable structured Node framework.
Kubernetes autoscaling, Helm, and CI/CD pipeline work.
Experience with high-throughput systems where latency and cost per request are engineering constraints.
Experience implementing observability using OpenTelemetry and an APM platform such as Dynatrace, Datadog, or New Relic.
Experience working within large enterprise environments supporting mission-critical applications.
Key Responsibilities

Design, develop, and maintain scalable backend services using Node.js and TypeScript.
Build cloud-native applications on Microsoft Azure, leveraging platform services to create resilient, secure, and highly available solutions.
Contribute to the design and evolution of distributed systems supporting order fulfillment across thousands of stores.
Build event-driven services and asynchronous processing pipelines, including the correctness concerns that come with them.
Develop high-performance REST APIs that power associate-facing applications.
Diagnose performance and scaling behavior in production and lower environments: throughput ceilings, autoscaling, and resource sizing.
Extend observability, distributed tracing, and metrics so that system behavior is measurable rather than inferred.
Partner with Product, UX, Mobile, and Frontend teams to design APIs and services that deliver exceptional user experiences.
Contribute to technical design discussions and architecture reviews.
Identify opportunities to improve system reliability, scalability, observability, and operational efficiency.
Champion engineering practices including automated testing and CI/CD.
Support production readiness and the operational work that follows capacity, failure modes, and incident response.
Evaluate emerging technologies, including AI-assisted development tools, to improve engineering productivity and software quality.