Senior Backend Engineer

Client of Scale Army

Role Overview

The Senior Backend Engineer will design, build, and operate the backend systems that power a high-growth B2B SaaS platform, owning meaningful features and services end to end. This role requires depth on the server side, sound judgment under ambiguity, and a bias toward pragmatic solutions built primarily in PHP and Go on MySQL/MariaDB. The Senior Backend Engineer will serve as a senior technical leader alongside the Staff Software Engineer, contributing directly to platform reliability, performance, and roadmap.

Location

Fully Remote (Work from Home) | 9AM - 5PM PST

Key Responsibilities

Architecture & Implementation

• Architect, implement, and maintain scalable backend services and APIs in PHP and Go.

• Handle integrations and background processing as the product requires.

Data Modeling & Performance

• Own data modeling and persistence, including relational databases and caching.

• Ensure sound schema design, efficient queries, and operational resilience using MySQL/MariaDB.

• Profile, debug, and tune performance; contribute automated tests where they materially reduce risk.

Operations & Mentorship

• Participate in CI/CD and operational practice with the team so changes ship safely and often.

• Support production and customer-impacting issues with clear communication and durable fixes.

• Document and share technical context so the codebase remains maintainable as the team grows.

• Provide technical leadership, code review, architectural guidance, and mentorship to junior developers.

Qualifications Experience

• 5+ years of professional backend engineering experience, with at least 2 years at a senior level.

• Strong, demonstrated production experience with PHP or Go (Golang).

• Hands-on MySQL/MariaDB experience in production environments.

• Experience navigating a scale-up/growth-stage company or an enterprise-scale organization.

• Telephony, dialer, CCaaS, or telco-adjacent domain experience is strongly preferred.

Qualifications Skills

• Proven track record of owning backend systems end to end including design, implementation, deployment, monitoring, and iteration.

• Experience with RESTful API design and implementation.

• Familiarity with event-driven architecture, background processing, or event sourcing patterns.

• Self-directed individual who takes ownership without being asked.

• Proactively communicates risks and blockers to teammates and stakeholders.

• Able to take an ambiguous problem, propose an approach, gain alignment, and deliver with minimal hand-holding.

What Success Looks Like

• First 90 Days: Independently trace a request from API entry to database and back, and ship at least one meaningful pull request to production within 30 days.

• First 180 Days: Deliver a visible, measurable improvement in the owned area such as latency reduction, uptime improvement, or query optimization.

• End of Year One: Own at least one core backend area with full accountability for its reliability, performance, and roadmap, leaving it meaningfully easier to build on than when you joined.

• Culture Impact: Contribute to the engineering team's culture of documentation, code quality, and operational discipline in a way that makes the whole team more effective.