Senior Backend Engineer

Summary

Join Supermetrics' newly formed API team as a Software Engineer and contribute to the company's API-first transformation. You will build a robust public API platform, implement an API-first culture, and collaborate with cross-functional teams. This role involves a mix of collaborative planning, active development, pair programming, quality assurance, and deployment and monitoring. You will work with a large, existing codebase, handle high-traffic systems, and collaborate extensively with other teams. The position offers the opportunity to shape technical decisions and team culture, while tackling challenging tasks and making a significant impact on the company's platform. This is an exciting opportunity to leave a legacy and elevate the engineering organization's practices.

Requirements

• Have professional experience with Object-Oriented PHP (version 8 or above)
• Write clean, maintainable PHP code and be familiar with the latest language features
• Have demonstrated ability to handle systems with high traffic and performance needs
• Understand how to write efficient code and design systems that scale
• Have experience with profiling, caching, and optimizing queries or algorithms for speed and memory usage
• Have practical experience with containerization and orchestration tools such as Docker and Kubernetes
• Be comfortable building and deploying services in a modern cloud environment (knowledge of CI/CD pipelines and DevOps culture)
• Have extensive experience in building and consuming APIs
• Be familiar with OpenAPI/Swagger specifications and have created or maintained API documentation
• Have worked with third-party APIs and understand RESTful principles; having grappled with OAuth or other API auth methods adds value
• Have solid experience with automated testing at multiple levels – including unit testing, functional testing, integration testing, and end-to-end testing
• Be able to write tests to validate your work and ensure reliability for mission-critical systems
• Be a fast learner with a growth mindset
• Quickly pick up new concepts, domains, and technologies
• Have a committed will to improve and raise the bar for software engineering standards, security best practices, and processes across the company
• Be committed to identifying areas to improve
• Be open to diverse perspectives and open-minded
• Have a good sense of humor and don’t take yourself too seriously
• Appreciate constructive criticism, recognizing it as a pathway to better yourself
• Be qualified to challenge others when you see a better solution, and be able to do so respectfully and constructively
• Be a skilled communicator
• Articulate complex technical concepts in a clear and concise manner, whether it’s explaining an idea in a design session or writing documentation for an API
• Be comfortable giving and receiving direct feedback
• Know that transparent communication (tempered with respect) helps the team reach its objectives faster
• Be a resourceful problem-solver
• Use critical thinking and creativity to find solutions when faced with ambiguity or a tricky problem
• Not give up easily
• Come up with another approach if one fails
• Enjoy solving puzzles and relish the chance to overcome challenges that don’t have a clear answer at first
• Be a team player
• Work well with others and enjoy collaborating
• Understand that our accomplishments are a team effort, especially since we enable many others through our work
• Be approachable, help your colleagues, and be motivated to seek help yourself

Responsibilities

• Attend sync meetings (daily stand-ups, sprint planning, etc.) and work from our Jira board to understand priorities and resolve blockers
• Brainstorm with the team to break down big ideas into manageable tasks and design scalable solutions
• Dive deep into coding tasks – whether you’re implementing a new API feature, improving performance on a high-traffic service, or fixing a bug that’s slowing down another team
• Write clean, modern PHP/TypeScript/Go/Python code following best practices and ensure new changes integrate well with our existing systems
• Work closely with colleagues whenever you or they are stuck
• Pair programs to solve a tricky problem or review a critical piece of code
• Be willing to ask for help or offer it – we grow as a team by learning from each other
• Ensure your code is well-tested at all levels
• Write unit tests, integration tests, and end-to-end (e2e) tests as needed to guarantee reliability
• If we encounter issues in production, help diagnose and fix them, and add tests to prevent regressions
• Own your code from development to deployment
• Deploy services (via Docker/Kubernetes in our multi-cloud environment) and monitor them to ensure everything runs smoothly
• If something goes wrong, investigate and resolve it – and you won’t rest until the new feature or fix is stable in production and delivering value
• Frequently interact with other teams
• Coordinate with a front-end team consuming your API, or assist another backend team to adhere to the new API standards
• Communication and cross-team collaboration are a big part of the job

Preferred Qualifications

• Have experience working with legacy codebases or large monolith systems
• Perhaps have been involved in gradually refactoring a monolith into microservices, or have maintained a product through major architectural changes
• Have proficiency in TypeScript, Go or Python
• Have familiarity with observability tools and practices
• Have experience with OpenTelemetry instrumentation, and using monitoring dashboards (like Grafana) or APM tools to track system health and performance
• Know how to set up alerts and interpret metrics to diagnose issues
• Have knowledge of leveraging AI tools for coding (e.g., using AI coding assistants, AI code reviews, or use of AI for documentation)
• Be proficient with modern development aids
• Have a deeper understanding of cloud infrastructure beyond the basics
• Have experience with cloud providers (AWS, GCP, etc.), CI/CD pipelines, or infrastructure-as-code
• Have extra cloud-native proficiency (networking, security, advanced Kubernetes features)
• Have the ability to occasionally travel for team gatherings or company off-sites

Benefits

• Attractive pay structure, including equity
• Excellent work equipment and home office allowance for those working in our fully remote locations
• Health care benefits and leisure time insurance
• Personal learning budget
• Sports and wellbeing allowance