Senior Backend Engineer

## About the role Every day, millions of developers use HackerRank to prove their skills. We're looking for a Senior Backend Software Development Engineer who can drive the technical direction of critical backend systems and lead the delivery of high-impact, platform-level initiatives. You will own the architecture and evolution of core backend services, mentor engineers across teams, and be a key technical decision-maker ensuring our platform remains fast, reliable, and scalable as we grow our global user base. ## What you will do - 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. ## Who you are - 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. ## AI fluency - Deep, hands-on proficiency with AI-powered development tools (e.g., GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Claude Code) - you don't just use them, you've developed workflows and best practices around them that you can teach others. - Strong working knowledge of LLMs and agentic AI systems - you understand model capabilities, limitations, context management, tool use, and can reason about w