Senior Backend Engineer
Senior Backend Engineer
Posted yesterday
SENIORITY
Senior
About the role
- Why Gravitate?
- At Gravitate, we're on a mission to put everyday supply and logistics decisions in motion, powered by innovative problem-solving from industry experts.
- A lot of companies say it. We mean it: Gravitate is different. Rooted in the spirit of collaboration, we thrive on the smarts of our people and the dynamic we've cultivated.
- Tell Me About My Job:
- If you are considering this role, you are someone who has stopped waiting to be handed well-defined work. You take a large, ambiguous problem, break it into a plan, and drive it to production — unblocking yourself and the people around you along the way.
- Drive delivery of large backend features end-to-end — breaking large projects into manageable plans, estimating work with moderate unknowns accurately, and raising risks early
- Lead technical design for complex features; evaluate trade-offs across performance, maintainability, and cost; document decisions; design for extensibility
- Own a significant area of the product or a full service — accountable for its reliability, performance, and evolution
- Build and operate Python services, APIs, and data models (MongoDB) deployed on Kubernetes across GCP and AzureDebug and resolve medium-to-large production issues; quickly identify root cause and drive fast response and recovery
- Drive monitoring, observability, and performance health in your product area
- Review code and technical designs with constructive, specific feedback; mentor junior and mid-level engineers, including on how to produce higher-quality designs
- Partner with product on medium-to-large features — contributing real feedback and helping shape product decisions in your domain
- Write clear technical documents; communicate complex technical topics to non-technical stakeholders and facilitate productive technical discussions
- Proactively unblock yourself and others; make pragmatic trade-offs between speed and quality
- Help shape team culture and engineering practices in your area of expertise.
- 5+ years of professional software engineering experience building and operating production backend systems
- Deep expertise in multiple areas of a backend stack: a primary server-side language (Python preferred), API design, data modeling, and automated testing
- Demonstrated track record of delivering large features end-to-end, on plans you built yourself, with moderate unknowns
- Experience owning a service or major product area in production — including its reliability and performance, not just its features
- Strong debugging and troubleshooting skills on medium-to-large issues; comfortable participating in on-call for what you own
- Working knowledge of infrastructure, security, and observability, plus CI/CD and deployment practices
- Experience mentoring junior and mid-level engineers and giving high-quality code review feedback
- Strong written and verbal communication — able to produce clear medium-to-large technical documents and explain trade-offs to non-technical stakeholders
Before you apply
Applying takes about a minute. These four things decide how fast it moves after that.
Your profile is current
It's what we read first. Occupations, seniority and locations matter more than a long history.
Two examples you can talk through
Not a portfolio — just two pieces of work where you can explain the decisions and what you'd change.
A number in mind
What you're on now and what would make you move. We negotiate better when we know both.
Your notice period
Employers plan around it, and it's the question that stalls offers most often.
Once you apply, someone reads it and calls you before anything reaches the employer — usually within two working days.
