Backend Engineer

HiLink; Aurora (CO); Hybrid; USD 120,000 - 150,000; Full time

Job summary

Hilink is seeking a Backend Engineer in Aurora, Colorado to architect and lead the backend for a high-scale RTC meeting platform. The role involves designing resilient Java microservices on Kubernetes, managing AWS architecture, and mentoring engineers. Candidates should have over 5 years of backend and Java experience, along with expertise in cloud infrastructure and microservice architecture. This position offers a dynamic work environment geared towards global scalability and security improvements.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of backend engineering experience.
• 5+ years of Java programming in production environments.
• 5+ years of Kubernetes experience in production.

Responsibilities

• Design resilient Java microservices on Kubernetes.
• Optimize low-latency APIs for various signaling and communication services.
• Lead incident response and ensure scalability and security of the platform.

Skills

Java

Kubernetes

AWS

PostgreSQL

Microservices

Observability

Education

Bachelor’s/Master’s in CS/Software Engineering

Tools

Terraform

GitHub Actions

Prometheus

Grafana

S3

Job description

As a Backend Engineer, you will architect and lead the backend for a high-scale RTC meeting platform. You’ll design resilient Java microservices on Kubernetes, own AWS architecture via Terraform, and drive scalability, security, performance, and cost. You’ll mentor engineers, set SLOs, lead incident response, and ensure the platform can scale globally.

Key Accountabilities & Activities

Architecture & Ownership:Design microservice boundaries, data models, and event-driven
patterns (Kafka/SQS/SNS). Define SLOs/SLIs, error budgets, capacity planning, and cost controls.

Scalable Java Services:Build low-latency APIs (REST/gRPC/WebSocket) for signaling, rooms,
presence, chat, recording webhooks, webhooks for AI/ASR pipelines. Optimize hot paths (JIT/GC, connection pools, backpressure, circuit breakers, bulkheads, idempotency).

Kubernetes & Cloud: Lead EKS operations: HPA/VPA, PodSecurity standards, NetworkPolicies, Ingress (ALB), autoscaling, blue/green/canary.

Own Terraform stacks: VPC, subnets/NAT, WAF/Shield, ALB/NLB, ECR, EKS, RDS/Aurora, ElastiCache, KMS, Secrets Manager.

AWS Security & Compliance: Enforce IAM least privilege, key rotation, S3 encryption/lifecycle, audit with CloudTrail/Config/GuardDuty. Implement data retention policies for recordings/transcripts.

Observability & Reliability: Establish OpenTelemetry tracing, Prometheus metrics, Grafana dashboards, alerting (SLO-based).

Lead incident response, RCAs, and resilience testing (chaos, failure injection). Performance & Scale

Global routing/CDN strategies, write/read segregation, caching layers, CQRS where appropriate.

Storage strategies for recordings: S3 multi-part, lifecycle → Glacier, parallelized processing via Lambda/SQS.

Drive CI/CD (GitHub Actions, ArgoCD), infrastructure promotion (dev→staging→prod), and change management

Background, Skills & Qualifications

Bachelor’s/Master’s in CS/Software Engineering (or equivalent).

5+ years backend engineering; 5+ years Java in production; 5+ years Kubernetes in production.

Expert with AWS (S3, Lambda, EC2, VPC design, Security Groups/NACLs, WAF/Shield, IAM, KMS).

Knowledge of microservice architecture, event-driven systems, and distributed systems fundamentals.

Strong with PostgreSQL/Aurora, Redis, messaging (Kafka/SQS/SNS).

Production-grade observability and incident management track record.

[Bonus] WebRTC server components (STUN/TURN/SFU vendors like LiveKit/Janus/mediasoup), gRPC, service mesh (Istio/Linkerd), cost optimization