Senior Backend Engineer

Brilliant Systems; Lahore; On-site; PKR 2,500,000 - 4,200,000; Full time

Job summary

Brilliant Systems is seeking a skilled backend engineer to design and operate high‑volume services. You will ensure correctness under retries and partitions, own production systems with alerting and runbooks, and modernize legacy code through careful testing and incremental delivery.

You will mentor teammates, participate in red-team exercises, and help define when to wake the team for urgent incidents. Strong SQL and production‑grade backend experience are required.

Qualifications

• Experience with production backend systems in typed languages.
• Ability to explain idempotency concepts to clients.
• Experience with systems where failures cost money or trust.
• Test-first development mindset and rationale for tests.

Responsibilities

• Design and build services that stay correct under retries, partitions, and duplicate delivery.
• Own a production system, including alerting, runbooks, and clear wake-up criteria.
• Modernize legacy systems by characterizing, testing, and replacing in slices.
• Participate in red-team week and attempt to break what others built.
• Mentor peers, review changes, and be reviewed.

Skills

Distributed systems

Backend development

SQL proficiency

Idempotency

Job description

Distributed systems, payments or high-volume messaging. You have run something at volume and have opinions about idempotency.

Much of our backend work is on systems where being wrong costs money or trust: payments that must reconcile, messaging at volume, and records where the audit log matters as much as the feature. The interesting problems appear under load, on the worst day, when a third party is misbehaving.

What you will do

• Design and build services that stay correct under retries, network partitions and duplicate delivery.
• Own a system in production, including the alerting, the runbook and a clear definition of what is worth waking someone up for.
• Work on legacy modernisation: characterise what exists, cover it with tests, then replace it in slices.
• Take part in red-team week, trying to break something a colleague built.
• Mentor, review and be reviewed.

What we need from you

• Several years of production backend work in a typed or disciplined language, and comfort in SQL.
• You can explain idempotency to a client without using the word until the second sentence.
• Experience with a system that had real consequences when it failed.
• You write tests first on the parts that matter, and can say why those parts.

Useful but not required

• Payments, telecoms or clinical systems experience.
• You have run a migration that could not have downtime.
• Familiarity with event-driven architectures and their failure modes.