Hybrid Senior Backend Engineer

at HackerRank

• Job title: Senior Backend Engineer
• Job type: Full Time
• Experience level: Senior
• Salary: Not specified
• Degree requirement: Bachelor's Degree
• Tech skills: Distributed Systems, Docker, Java, JavaScript, Kafka, Kubernetes, MySQL, Node.js, NoSQL, Postgres, Python, RabbitMQ, Redis, Ruby, Go
• Location requirements: Hybrid, Santa Clara, United States

About the role

• Senior Backend Engineer at HackerRank driving technical direction and leading delivery of backend systems. Mentoring engineers and ensuring platform reliability, performance, and scalability.

Responsibilities

• 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