Principal Backend Engineer: Real-Time API on Kubernetes

Lakefusion; Texas; Hybrid; USD 160,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

LakeFusion is seeking a Principal Backend Engineer to scale our real-time API to enterprise production workloads. This deeply technical role focuses on building resilient, fault-tolerant distributed systems that run reliably in diverse customer environments.

You will ship into customer environments across Azure, AWS, and customer-managed Kubernetes clusters, prioritizing defensive design, observability, and thorough testing under failure conditions.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of backend engineering experience in production
• Proficiency in Python and FastAPI, with async patterns
• Strong Kubernetes experience including autoscaling (HPA, KEDA)
• Experience building high-throughput, low-latency distributed systems
• Experience with streaming technologies (Kafka, Pulsar, Kinesis)
• Ability to deploy to varied customer environments and ensure portability
• Strong observability, logging, metrics, and tracing practices
• Excellent technical communication across US and India-based teams

Responsibilities

• Own architecture and implementation of high-throughput real-time API
• Design for resilience and fault tolerance in diverse environments
• Tune Kubernetes autoscaling for bursty workloads
• Develop streaming pipelines across service, transactional, and analytical layers
• Design portable services for customer environments without serverless dependencies
• Profile and optimize latency and throughput across full stack
• Lead technical architecture and deployment tooling

Skills

Backend engineering

Python

FastAPI

Kubernetes

Observability

Distributed systems

Performance tuning

Architecture leadership

Streaming systems

Deployment portability

Tools

Python

FastAPI

Kubernetes

Kafka

Pulsar

Kinesis

Databricks

Job description

LakeFusion is seeking a Principal Backend Engineer to scale our real-time API to enterprise production workloads. This deeply technical role focuses on building resilient, fault-tolerant distributed systems that run reliably in diverse customer environments.

You will ship into customer environments across Azure, AWS, and customer-managed Kubernetes clusters, prioritizing defensive design, observability, and thorough testing under failure conditions.