Senior Backend Architect — GraphQL, REST & API Leadership

Jobtailor; California (MO); On-site; USD 150,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Jobtailor is seeking an accomplished backend engineering leader to architect and guide scalable GraphQL services and RESTful APIs. You will steer API standards, drive backend decisions, and shape the overall infrastructure to ensure secure, high-performance systems.

In this role, you will recruit and mentor a high-performing team, collaborate with Product, DevOps, and Architecture, and own the backend roadmap.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of backend engineering experience.
• 2+ years of engineering management experience leading software teams.
• Strong experience designing and building GraphQL servers (e.g., Apollo, Hasura, or similar).
• Strong experience building RESTful APIs at scale.
• Deep knowledge of API design principles, schema modeling, and optimization.
• Experience with modern backend frameworks using Node.js or comparable.
• Familiarity with cloud-native architectures (AWS, GCP, or Azure).
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines, containerization (Docker), and orchestration (Kubernetes, Pulumi, or similar).
• Strong understanding of database technologies (SQL and/or NoSQL).
• Excellent communication and cross-functional collaboration skills.
• Experience leveraging AI-powered coding tools (e.g., GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, or similar) to improve engineering productivity, code quality, and development workflows.

Responsibilities

• Lead the architecture, design, and implementation of scalable GraphQL services and RESTful APIs.
• Define and enforce API standards, schema design best practices, and versioning strategies.
• Drive decisions around backend frameworks, tooling, infrastructure, and observability.
• Ensure systems are secure, performant, resilient, and maintainable.
• Oversee API lifecycle management, including documentation, testing, monitoring, and deprecation.
• Hire, mentor, and develop a high-performing backend engineering team.
• Foster a culture of ownership, accountability, collaboration, and continuous improvement.
• Partner with Product, Client Engineering, DevOps, Research, and Architecture teams to deliver aligned solutions.
• Own roadmap planning, prioritization, and execution for backend services.
• Establish engineering best practices for code quality, CI/CD, testing, and deployment.
• Manage technical debt proactively while balancing feature development.
• Drive observability, logging, metrics, and performance monitoring standards.
• Lead incident response and root cause analysis for backend services.
• Implement reliability practices such as SLIs/SLOs and capacity planning.
• Ensure compliance with security and data governance standards.

Skills

GraphQL Server Design

RESTful API Development

Backend Frameworks (Node.js)

CI/CD

Cloud-Native Architectures

Docker

Kubernetes

SQL

NoSQL

Observability

Security Compliance

Tools

Apollo

Hasura

GitHub Copilot

Claude Code

Pulumi

Job description

Jobtailor is seeking an accomplished backend engineering leader to architect and guide scalable GraphQL services and RESTful APIs. You will steer API standards, drive backend decisions, and shape the overall infrastructure to ensure secure, high-performance systems.

In this role, you will recruit and mentor a high-performing team, collaborate with Product, DevOps, and Architecture, and own the backend roadmap.