Senior Back End Engineer

Zello

Senior Back End Engineer with production responsibility for Zello's backend services and infrastructure. Working on critical systems at real-time scale for voice communication platform.

Posted 4/28/2026full-timeAustin • Texas • 🇺🇸 United StatesSeniorWebsite

Tech Stack

Tools & technologies

CassandraDistributed SystemsGoGrafanaMongoDBMySQLRust

About the role

Key responsibilities & impact

Operate as a senior individual contributor on the backend services team, owning production for distributed systems at real-time scale.
Carry the on-call rotation for Zello's most critical infrastructure. Lead incident response, write runbooks, and turn each incident into a durable improvement.
Build observability where it's missing. Set SLOs, instrument services with Grafana and Loki, and shift team posture from reactive to proactive.
Ship production C++ today; contribute to Rust and Go components as they come online.
Work hands-on across our database stack: Cassandra, MongoDB, MySQL and choosing the right tool for the workload.
Contribute to backend 2.0: a ground-up modernization of the platform anchored on AI-native engineering workflows (AGENTS.md, CLAUDE.md, .cursor/rules).

Requirements

What you’ll need

You've carried real production weight on distributed systems at scale, and you talk about reliability as something you own, not something you measure.
You've shipped C++ in production for years and read long-lived backend codebases without flinching. Rust or Go in your toolkit is a plus.
You've gone deep on at least one of Cassandra, MongoDB, or MySQL, and can name the tradeoffs because you've felt them in production.
You use AI-assisted development as a default and have shaped CLAUDE.md, AGENTS.md, .cursor/rules, or equivalent for a real team.
You thrive on a small team where every hire moves the needle. You drop ego in code review. You take scope, you don't wait for it.
Your definition of "done" includes tests, alerts, observability, and runbooks.

Benefits

Comp & perks

Competitive pay
Equity with significant upside
Sabbatical after every five years of service
Flexible schedules and time off
Ping-pong table and free snacks in break room

ATS Keywords

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Applicant Tracking System Keywords

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Hard Skills & Tools

C++RustGoCassandraMongoDBMySQLdistributed systemsobservabilityAI-assisted developmentSLOs

Soft Skills

incident responseproactive mindsetteam collaborationcode reviewreliability ownershipsmall team dynamicsego managementscope managementdefinition of donecommunication