Senior Backend Engineer - AI Microservices & gRPC

Fresh Consulting; Portland (OR); On-site; USD 103,000 - 117,000; Full time

Job summary

Fresh Consulting in Portland, OR is seeking an experienced Senior Software Engineer to help build distributed, AI-enabled systems. You will collaborate with our engineering team to drive technical innovation and mentor junior engineers, shaping architecture and best practices.

Responsibilities include designing microservices on Linux, implementing gRPC APIs with Protocol Buffers, building scalable data pipelines, and advancing observability, CI/CD, and containerized deployments.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of professional experience developing distributed backend systems on Linux.
• Deep curiosity for software and systems architecture topics.
• Expert-level Python programming and software architecture skills.
• Strong system design with a focus on API contracts and fault tolerance.
• Fluency operating in Linux environments - shell, logs, and process reasoning.
• Excellence in technical communication and documentation.

Responsibilities

• Contribute to the architecture and development of production-grade distributed microservice systems running on Linux
• Drive technical initiatives to advance service mesh, contract-first APIs, and inter-service communication patterns
• Build scalable data processing pipelines and high-throughput service infrastructure
• Design and evolve protobuf contracts and gRPC service definitions across the platform
• Provide technical guidance to junior team members

Skills

Distributed backend

Python expert

System design

Linux fluency

Technical comms

Tools

gRPC

Protocol Buffers

Docker

CI/CD

Bazel

Buck

Pants

Terraform

Ansible

Job description

Fresh Consulting in Portland, OR is seeking an experienced Senior Software Engineer to help build distributed, AI-enabled systems. You will collaborate with our engineering team to drive technical innovation and mentor junior engineers, shaping architecture and best practices.

Responsibilities include designing microservices on Linux, implementing gRPC APIs with Protocol Buffers, building scalable data pipelines, and advancing observability, CI/CD, and containerized deployments.