Senior Backend Architect - Scalable Systems & Data

Zest for Tech; New York (NY); Hybrid; USD 234,000 - 286,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Hybrid work (3 days/week) in Lower Man

Healthcare

Unlimited PTO

Learning & development allowance

Technical ownership

Job summary

Zest for Tech is seeking a Senior II Backend Engineer in NYC to design, build and scale core backend services for a fast-growing scale-up. You will own architecture decisions and mentor teammates while shaping production-grade distributed systems.

The role emphasizes hands-on backend development, data pipelines, and event-driven design, with a hybrid office in Lower Manhattan and a strong focus on ownership and impact.

Qualifications

• 8–10+ years of software engineering experience, with extensive hands-on backend development.
• Proven experience designing, building and scaling complex backend systems in production.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems, asynchronous processing and event-driven architectures.
• Proficiency in at least 2 of TypeScript, Python and Go.
• Experience designing and working with SQL and NoSQL databases.
• Ability to independently own substantial engineering projects from design through to production.
• Regular use of AI coding tools within your development workflow.
• Cloud infrastructure experience is beneficial but not essential.

Responsibilities

• Designing and building scalable distributed backend systems.
• Developing large-scale data ingestion and processing pipelines.
• Building asynchronous systems using queues, workers and event-driven architectures.
• Developing high-throughput APIs and complex data models.
• Building reliable notification, messaging and external integration systems.
• Taking ownership of technical design decisions and mentoring other engineers.

Skills

Backend development

Distributed systems

Async processing

Event-driven architectures

SQL

NoSQL

Go

TypeScript

Python

Tools

AI coding tools

Job description

Zest for Tech is seeking a Senior II Backend Engineer in NYC to design, build and scale core backend services for a fast-growing scale-up. You will own architecture decisions and mentor teammates while shaping production-grade distributed systems.

The role emphasizes hands-on backend development, data pipelines, and event-driven design, with a hybrid office in Lower Manhattan and a strong focus on ownership and impact.