Senior Backend Engineer - AI, Microservices & Linux

Rapta, Inc; Portland (OR); Hybrid; USD 150,000 - 230,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Early-stage equity

Competitive compensation

Benefits package

Professional development

Job summary

Rapta, Inc in Portland, OR is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to advance distributed, AI-powered backend systems. This full-time role partners with the engineering team to drive technical innovation and mentors mid-level and junior engineers.

You will design scalable microservice architectures on Linux, implement gRPC with Protocol Buffers, and contribute to service mesh and API contracts. Strong Python, systems design, and logging/observability are essential, with remote-friendly options.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of professional experience building distributed backend systems on Linux.
• Strong Python programming and software architecture skills.
• Deep knowledge of API contracts, service boundaries, and fault tolerance.
• Experience with gRPC and Protocol Buffers; contract-first development.

Responsibilities

• Contribute to architecture and development of production-grade distributed microservices on Linux.
• Drive initiatives to advance service mesh, 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.
• Provide technical guidance to junior engineers.

Skills

Distributed backend systems

Python programming

System design

API contracts (gRPC/Protobuf)

Linux proficiency

Technical communication

CI/CD

Docker

Observability

Mentoring teammates

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

Terraform

Ansible

Bazel

Protocol Buffers

Job description

Rapta, Inc in Portland, OR is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to advance distributed, AI-powered backend systems. This full-time role partners with the engineering team to drive technical innovation and mentors mid-level and junior engineers.

You will design scalable microservice architectures on Linux, implement gRPC with Protocol Buffers, and contribute to service mesh and API contracts. Strong Python, systems design, and logging/observability are essential, with remote-friendly options.