
Senior Backend Software Engineer
Ketch
full-time
Posted on:
Location Type: Hybrid
Location: San Francisco • California • United States
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Salary
💰 $160,000 - $220,000 per year
Job Level
Tech Stack
About the role
- You'll build reliable, high-performance systems that make sense of messy, high-stakes data flowing through databases, pipelines, SaaS tools, websites, and mobile apps.
- Design and build Go microservices that process distributed data flows and support real-time governance decisions across an organization's entire stack
- Develop clean, well-versioned APIs that orchestrate permissions, data directives, and automated actions across external systems
- Build distributed pipelines and event-driven architectures that transform structured and unstructured data and feed downstream intelligence
- Own the full lifecycle — from understanding the customer problem through design, implementation, deployment, monitoring, and iteration
- Apply resilience patterns (timeouts, retries, circuit breakers) to keep systems predictable under real-world load
- Drive performance through concurrency tuning and efficient resource usage
- Contribute to architecture decisions: service boundaries, data models, queue/stream strategy, and AI integration points
- Talk directly to customers to understand their pain points and translate requirements into scalable system designs
Requirements
- Strong backend engineering foundation in Go or similar systems languages
- Experience building APIs, distributed systems, or microservices in cloud-native environments (AWS/GCP/Azure)
- Familiarity with databases and storage systems: Postgres, DynamoDB, ScyllaDB, Redis, Elasticsearch, or similar
- Understanding of distributed-systems fundamentals: concurrency, queues/streams, transactions, event-driven patterns
- Experience with gRPC, REST, and service-to-service communication
- Comfort with Kubernetes, containers, and operational concerns (security, networking, resource management)
- Interest in modern AI/data tools (LLM APIs, embeddings, retrieval)
- Experience using AI coding assistants (Cursor, Claude Code, Copilot, or similar) in your daily workflow
- Curiosity, grit, and a drive to figure things out without heavy direction — startup experience is a plus
- CS degree or equivalent practical experience building production systems
Benefits
- full medical/dental/vision
- 401(k)
- equity
- Three company-wide events per year in San Francisco
Applicant Tracking System Keywords
Tip: use these terms in your resume and cover letter to boost ATS matches.
Hard Skills & Tools
GoAPIsmicroservicesdistributed systemscloud-native environmentsgRPCRESTKubernetesdatabasesevent-driven architectures
Soft Skills
curiositygritproblem-solvingcustomer communicationadaptability
Certifications
CS degree