HackerRank

Senior Backend Engineer

HackerRank

full-time

Posted on:

Location Type: Hybrid

Location: Santa Clara • California • United States

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Job Level

Senior

Tech Stack

Distributed SystemsDockerGoJavaJavaScriptKafkaKubernetesMySQLNode.jsNoSQLPostgresPythonRabbitMQRedisRuby

About the role

  • Architect, design, and lead the implementation of complex backend systems and services that power core product experiences at scale.
  • Define and drive technical strategy for your domain, making key decisions on system design, technology choices, and long-term architectural direction.
  • Own the end-to-end reliability and performance of critical backend services, establishing SLOs, monitoring, and incident response best practices.
  • Design scalable API frameworks and data models that serve as foundations for multiple product teams and external integrations.
  • Lead cross-functional technical initiatives spanning multiple teams, coordinating with frontend, infrastructure, product, and design stakeholders.
  • Identify and drive large-scale refactoring efforts, tackling tech debt and evolving legacy systems into modern, maintainable architectures.
  • Mentor and grow engineers on the team through design reviews, code reviews, and hands-on technical guidance.
  • Contribute to engineering-wide standards, tooling, and processes that raise the bar for code quality and developer productivity.

Requirements

  • Senior backend engineer with 3-6 years of experience building and operating production backend systems at scale.
  • Expert in at least one modern backend programming language (e.g., Python, Ruby, Go, Java, or Node.js) with strong fundamentals across the stack.
  • Proven ability to design and build distributed systems — you've made meaningful architectural decisions around service decomposition, data consistency, fault tolerance, and observability.
  • Deep expertise with relational databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL) and NoSQL stores, including schema design, query optimization, and data modeling for high-throughput workloads.
  • Strong understanding of caching strategies (Redis/Memcached), asynchronous messaging (Kafka/RabbitMQ), and event-driven architectures.
  • Hands-on experience with containerization (Docker/Kubernetes), CI/CD pipelines, and infrastructure-as-code practices.
  • Track record of leading technical projects from ambiguous problem statements through to production delivery.
Benefits
  • Health insurance
  • 401(k) matching
  • Flexible work hours
  • Paid time off
  • Remote work options
Applicant Tracking System Keywords

Tip: use these terms in your resume and cover letter to boost ATS matches.

Hard Skills & Tools
backend programming languagePythonRubyGoJavaNode.jsdistributed systemsrelational databasesNoSQLdata modeling
Soft Skills
leadershipmentoringcross-functional collaborationtechnical strategyproblem-solving