Senior Backend API Engineer for Mobile Apps

Slickdeals; San Mateo (CA); Hybrid; USD 176,000 - 220,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive base salary

Annual bonus

Equity package

Healthcare plans

401K matching

Professional Development Reimbursement

Job summary

Slickdeals is seeking a Senior II Backend Engineer to provide technical leadership and API support for our mobile applications. You will own complex backend initiatives, shape architecture, and collaborate with Mobile, Web, Product, Design, and Platform teams to deliver reliable experiences.

The ideal candidate has deep backend expertise, modern PHP experience, and a track record refactoring legacy systems while improving performance, testing, and deployment practices.

Qualifications

• Experience building backend services for large-scale consumer apps.
• Strong expertise in PHP and modern PHP frameworks.
• Experience designing high-traffic RESTful or GraphQL APIs.
• Deep understanding of API contracts, auth, caching, and pagination.

Responsibilities

• Design and deliver complex APIs and backend services for iOS and Android.
• Own backend initiatives from discovery to production support.
• Define API contracts and backward-compatibility requirements with mobile engineers.
• Influence architecture with reusable patterns across products.
• Identify risks early and present tradeoffs to partners.
• Improve reliability, scalability, performance, security, and observability.
• Lead design reviews and raise engineering standards.
• Diagnose production issues spanning mobile clients, APIs, and data services.
• Reduce technical debt while balancing near-term delivery.
• Contribute to cross-platform web API development when needed.

Skills

PHP

REST APIs

GraphQL

MySQL

PostgreSQL

JWT

RabbitMQ

Redis

Kafka

Docker

Kubernetes

CI/CD

GitHub Actions

A/B Testing

Analytics

APNs/FCM

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

RabbitMQ

Redis

Kafka

GitHub

Job description

Slickdeals is seeking a Senior II Backend Engineer to provide technical leadership and API support for our mobile applications. You will own complex backend initiatives, shape architecture, and collaborate with Mobile, Web, Product, Design, and Platform teams to deliver reliable experiences.

The ideal candidate has deep backend expertise, modern PHP experience, and a track record refactoring legacy systems while improving performance, testing, and deployment practices.