Backend Application Engineer

Bright Vision Technologies; Highlands Ranch (CO); Remote; USD 120,000 - 175,000; Full time

Job summary

Bright Vision Technologies seeks a Backend Application Engineer to design, build, and operate foundational platform services used by many teams. You will focus on high-throughput backend platforms, with emphasis on latency, reliability, and developer experience.

You will lead multi-region designs, drive incident response, and mentor mid‑level engineers while producing clear design docs and runbooks. This is a 100% remote, full‑time W2 role in the US, offering a competitive salary and benefits.

Qualifications

• 6+ years of professional backend or platform engineering experience.
• Experience building and operating internal platforms used by multiple engineering teams.
• Strong distributed-systems design with focus on consistency, availability, latency, and failure modes.
• Proficiency in Java, Go, Scala, Rust, or modern C++.
• Experience with high‑throughput messaging, streaming, and event‑driven architectures (Kafka, Pulsar, or NATS).
• Knowledge of relational, key‑value, document, and search data stores.
• Led multi‑quarter platform initiatives with stakeholder management.
• Excellent written and verbal communication; ability to write design documents.

Responsibilities

• Design and build internal platform services and shared infrastructure with focus on developer experience and operational ergonomics.
• Architect high‑throughput, latency‑sensitive backend platforms for very high request volumes.
• Build durable event‑processing pipelines and asynchronous job execution platforms.
• Design and operate caching, rate‑limiting, and request‑shaping layers for safe scaling.
• Develop platform SDKs and libraries to codify best practices.
• Establish observability, SLOs, and capacity‑planning for platform services.
• Drive multi‑region, fault‑tolerant, geo‑distributed designs with availability and durability in mind.
• Lead incident response for high‑impact platform issues and drive durable improvements.
• Define platform‑wide API design, deployment, and backward‑compatibility standards.
• Optimize platform performance with profiling and data‑driven tuning.
• Collaborate with infrastructure, security, and SRE to meet reliability and compliance.
• Mentor engineers and lead architectural discussions.
• Produce design documents and runbooks for maintainers.
• Evaluate emerging platform technologies and open‑source projects.

Skills

Distributed systems

Backend development

Mentoring

Technical leadership

Technical writing

Code review

Stakeholder management

Communication

Education

Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in CS/SE

Tools

Kafka

Pulsar

NATS

Kubernetes

Job description

Job Summary

We are seeking a Backend Application Engineer focused on high-throughput platform development to design, build, and operate the foundational platforms and shared services that other engineering teams rely on to deliver their products. This role focuses on building backend platform capabilities — request routing, traffic management, data fan‑out, caching layers, asynchronous job execution, and durable event processing — that must handle very high traffic volumes with predictable latency and minimal operational toil. The ideal candidate combines deep distributed systems expertise with strong platform‑engineering instincts, values internal developer experience as a first‑class concern, and has a track record of leading multi‑quarter platform initiatives that meaningfully raise the engineering bar for the organizations they support.

Key Responsibilities

• Design and build internal platform services and shared infrastructure that hundreds of engineers depend on every day, with explicit focus on developer experience and operational ergonomics.
• Architect high-throughput, latency‑sensitive backend platforms capable of sustaining very high request volumes with predictable, well‑bounded tail latency.
• Build durable, replayable event‑processing pipelines and asynchronous job execution platforms that other product teams compose to ship features faster.
• Design and operate caching, rate‑limiting, and request‑shaping layers that protect upstream systems and enable safe scaling under bursty workloads.
• Develop platform abstractions, SDKs, and paved‑road libraries that codify best practices and let product teams consume capabilities without re‑implementing them.
• Establish robust observability, SLOs, and capacity‑planning practices for platform services, raising the operational bar across the organization.
• Drive multi‑region, fault‑tolerant, and geo‑distributed designs with rigorous attention to availability, durability, and graceful degradation under failure.
• Lead incident response for high‑impact platform issues, conduct blameless post‑mortems, and drive durable engineering improvements that prevent recurrence.
• Define and enforce platform‑wide standards around API design, schema evolution, deployment, and backward‑compatibility guarantees.
• Optimize platform performance through careful profiling, data‑driven tuning, and algorithmic improvements that move the needle on throughput and cost.
• Partner with infrastructure, security, and SRE teams to ensure platform services meet enterprise reliability, compliance, and security obligations.
• Mentor mid‑level engineers and lead architectural discussions across teams, helping the broader organization grow in distributed‑systems maturity.
• Produce clear technical design documents, decision records, and operational runbooks that make the platform legible to future maintainers.
• Continuously evaluate emerging platform technologies, open‑source projects, and architectural patterns for strategic adoption.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a closely related technical discipline.
• Six or more years of professional backend or platform engineering experience.
• Demonstrated track record building and operating internal platforms or shared services consumed by multiple engineering teams.
• Strong, hands‑on expertise designing distributed systems with rigorous attention to consistency, availability, latency, and failure‑mode behavior.
• Advanced proficiency in at least one major backend language such as Java, Go, Scala, Rust, or modern C++.
• Deep understanding of high‑throughput messaging, streaming, and event‑driven architectures using technologies such as Kafka, Pulsar, or NATS.
• Strong working knowledge of data storage systems across relational, key‑value, document, and search workloads.
• Proven experience leading multi‑quarter platform initiatives across teams, including stakeholder management and technical decision‑making.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, including ability to author crisp technical design documents and present trade‑offs clearly.
• Demonstrated ability to mentor engineers and shape engineering culture through code review, design review, and onboarding contributions.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience operating Kubernetes‑based platforms or contributing to internal developer‑platform initiatives at scale.
• Contributions to widely‑used open‑source platform or infrastructure projects.
• Familiarity with control‑plane / data‑plane patterns, service mesh internals, or workflow‑orchestration engines.
• Experience designing platform APIs with strong backward‑compatibility and versioning guarantees.
• Public technical writing, conference talks, or other community contributions on platform engineering topics.

Employment Terms & Visa Policy

Job Title: Backend Application Engineer

Location: 100% Remote (Continental United States)

Position Type: In‑house Bright Vision Technologies SOW engagement (no third‑party client or vendor)

Salary: $120K - $175K

Experience: 6+ years

This is a 100% remote, full‑time, direct W2 position with Bright Vision Technologies.

This role is part of Bright Vision Technologies’ in‑house Statement of Work (SOW) engagement. The client, end customer, and employer for this position is Bright Vision Technologies — there is no third‑party client, vendor, or implementation partner involved.

We do not engage in C2C, 1099, or third‑party arrangements for this role.

Candidates must be willing to work directly as a full‑time W2 employee of Bright Vision Technologies and contribute to our in‑house SOW deliverables.

No new H1B sponsorship is available for this role.

However, candidates who are currently on a valid H1B visa and require a transfer