Senior Backend Engineer: APIs, Data & Infra Leader

Knowmadics; United States; On-site; USD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Knowmadics seeks a Software Engineer IV to own end-to-end backend services, APIs, and data integrations. You will model and persist data, build integrations, and support infrastructure for reliable operations.

You will also contribute to frontend demos and assist product teams across multi-sprint efforts with architecture and planning. You will collaborate with data scientists and engineers to deliver scalable, secure, and observable systems, mentoring juniors and improving tooling, frameworks,

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Data Engineering, Information Systems, or a related STEM field; or equivalent practical experience.
• 5+ years of experience in software engineering, backend engineering, data engineering, or data-intensive application development.
• Ability to obtain and maintain a U.S. security clearance; U.S. Citizenship required.
• Strong proficiency in Python and experience designing and implementing standards-based APIs using FastAPI or a similar framework, including asynchronous request handling, data validation, and error handling. Professional experience with at least one systems-oriented language such as Go or Java.
• Experience building and operating production services across backend, data, and infrastructure layers, with ownership from requirements and design through implementation, testing, deployment, and operational support.
• Experience with PostgreSQL or similar relational databases, including data modeling, query design, structured data-access patterns, and spatial capabilities such as PostGIS.
• Experience building geospatial services and working with geospatial tools and cloud-optimized formats, including GeoPandas, Shapely, GDAL, Rasterio, Apache Sedona, GeoJSON, GeoParquet, Cloud Optimized GeoTIFF, or similar technologies.
• Experience working with structured, semi-structured, geospatial, analytical, time-series, or other real-world application data.
• Experience with service communication and messaging patterns, including gRPC, MQTT, Kafka, queues, server-sent events, or similar technologies.
• Working knowledge of networking and communications concepts relevant to distributed applications, including TCP/IP, DNS, TLS, routing, service discovery, bandwidth, latency, and common failure modes.
• Experience deploying and operating containerized services in AWS or similar cloud environments and Kubernetes, including local or standalone cluster environments.
• Working knowledge of infrastructure-as-code and CI/CD practices using Terraform, Helm, GitHub Actions, and Git-based workflows, including automated testing and code review practices.
• Experience implementing testing strategies, including unit, integration, end-to-end, and data-validation tests.
• Familiarity with observability and debugging practices, including logging, monitoring, alerting, and troubleshooting distributed systems.
• Working knowledge of security best practices, including authentication, authorization, role-based access control, and secure data handling.

Responsibilities

• Own and deliver end-to-end features and platform capabilities across backend services, APIs, persistence, data integrations, infrastructure, and supporting user interfaces.
• Design, implement, and maintain reliable, performant, and maintainable services, APIs, data models, persistence layers, and service contracts.
• Build services that ingest, validate, transform, persist, query, and publish structured, semi-structured, geospatial, analytical, and other application data.
• Translate product and technical requirements into solutions, including acceptance criteria, technical designs, estimates, constraints, and dependencies.
• Lead technical planning and architecture for multi-sprint efforts within the team's area of responsibility, balancing tradeoffs across performance, scalability, robustness, security, maintainability, and complexity.
• Implement service integrations and asynchronous or event-driven workflows that support reliable data exchange and processing.
• Develop capabilities for authentication, authorization, role-based access control, secure data handling, provenance, and auditability.
• Own service infrastructure, deployment workflows, operational readiness, monitoring, alerting, troubleshooting, and recovery procedures.
• Write clean, maintainable, and well-tested code, and debug non-trivial issues across application code, data flows, services, integrations, deployments, and infrastructure.
• Build lightweight user interfaces and demonstrations when needed to validate workflows and communicate capabilities.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams, coordinate technical dependencies, participate in design reviews and code reviews, and produce clear technical documentation.
• Support onboarding and mentorship of junior engineers, interns, and new team members while contributing to improvements in team tools, workflows, testing strategies, observability, and service reliability.

Skills

Python proficiency

APIs design

Distributed systems

Data engineering

Backend engineering

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Data Engineering, Information Systems, or related STEM field

Tools

PostgreSQL

PostGIS

GeoPandas

Shapely

GDAL

Rasterio

GeoJSON

GeoParquet

Cloud Optimized GeoTIFF

Kubernetes

AWS

Terraform

Helm

GitHub Actions

gRPC

Kafka

MQTT

Job description

Knowmadics seeks a Software Engineer IV to own end-to-end backend services, APIs, and data integrations. You will model and persist data, build integrations, and support infrastructure for reliable operations.

You will also contribute to frontend demos and assist product teams across multi-sprint efforts with architecture and planning. You will collaborate with data scientists and engineers to deliver scalable, secure, and observable systems, mentoring juniors and improving tooling, frameworks,