Senior Backend Engineer (Java/Scala)

Job Title: Senior Backend Engineer (Java/Scala)

Location: Denver, CO

Duration: Long Term

About the Role

We''re looking for a senior engineer who doesn''t just write code - they own outcomes. You''ll be responsible for the full lifecycle of backend services: from design and development through production reliability. In an era where AI can generate code, we value engineers who think critically, anticipate problems, and drive systems forward.

What We Expect

End-to-End Ownership

• Own features from design -> development -> testing -> deployment -> production support
• Take accountability for the reliability and performance of your services in production
• Drive technical decisions without waiting to be told what to do

System Design & Architecture

• Design scalable, resilient distributed systems handling millions of daily transactions
• Make pragmatic trade-off decisions (consistency vs. availability, complexity vs. speed)
• Produce clear technical design documents and lead design reviews
• Evaluate build vs. buy decisions with data

Development

• Strong proficiency in Java and/or Scala
• Build high-throughput, low-latency microservices
• Write clean, maintainable code - but more importantly, know when and what to build

Testing & Quality

• Write meaningful unit, integration, and contract tests - not just for coverage metrics
• Own E2E test strategy for your services
• Build confidence in deployments through automated validation

Infrastructure & Cloud (AWS)

• Hands-on with AWS services (ECS/EKS, Lambda, S3, SQS, CloudWatch, IAM)
• Understand networking, security, and cost implications of architectural choices
• Comfortable with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform/CloudFormation)

Data & Messaging

• Kafka - design event-driven architectures, manage topics, handle consumer lag and rebalancing
• Redis - caching strategies, pub/sub, cluster management
• MongoDB/DocumentDB - schema design, indexing, query optimization, aggregation pipelines

Monitoring & Observability

• Datadog - build dashboards, set meaningful alerts, track SLOs, analyze APM traces
• Splunk - log analysis, search queries, correlation across services for incident investigation
• Understand distributed tracing, structured logging, and metric-driven decision making

SRE Mindset

• Analyze production incidents: read logs, trace requests, identify root cause under pressure
• Think about failure modes before they happen (circuit breakers, retries, fallbacks, graceful degradation)
• Participate in on-call rotations and drive blameless post-mortems
• Proactively identify capacity risks and performance bottlenecks

Proactive Analysis & Innovation

• Identify risks, tech debt, and performance bottlenecks before they become incidents
• Propose and drive improvements - don''t wait for a ticket
• Stay current with industry trends and bring relevant ideas to the team
• Challenge existing patterns when they no longer serve the system