Senior Backend Engineer - Go, Distributed Systems

Orbis Operations; McLean (VA); On-site; USD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Retirement matching

PTO policy

Job summary

Orbis Operations, headquartered in McLean, VA, seeks a Senior Backend Engineer to drive the Catalyst platform's architecture and scalability. You will own medium-sized features end to end, design distributed systems, and lead performance improvements across pipelines.

You will work with product and engineering teams, implement core runtime features, and participate in on-call rotations with a focus on reliability and security in demanding environments. International travel is required up to 25%.

Qualifications

• 5–7 years of backend or platform engineering with demonstrated ownership of meaningful product surfaces.
• Proficiency in Go, including concurrency patterns (goroutines, channels, cancelable contexts) and process and subprocess management.
• Experience designing and consuming gRPC/protobuf service contracts across process boundaries, including versioned schema evolution.
• Hands-on experience implementing idempotent state machines and delivery guarantees in distributed pipelines.
• Experience with streaming or durable message systems (NATS JetStream or equivalent).
• Experience building integration test suites (e.g., testcontainers) that exercise multi-component systems end to end.
• Exceptional communication skills across technical and non-technical audiences; travel up to 25%.

Responsibilities

• Own architecture for medium-sized features end to end within the Catalyst platform runtime.
• Trace and debug requests across the full pipeline flow to root-cause issues that cross process and network boundaries.
• Evaluate and document critical technical trade-offs for Catalyst production systems with clear architectural rationale.
• Partner with product and engineering stakeholders to refine requirements and deliver solutions balancing product vision with system integrity.
• Design and implement core runtime features, including supervised goroutine lifecycles and cancelable contexts.
• Contribute to evolution of core system components, including inter-service communication protocols and distributed persistence layer.
• Define testing standards and shift testing left; implement end-to-end tests and chaos testing for resilience.
• Participate in on-call rotation for the platform runtime and lead post-mortems with actionable follow-ups.

Skills

Go concurrency

Goroutines & channels

gRPC/Protobuf

Distributed systems

Event streaming

Testcontainers

On-call support

Excellent communication

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

NATS JetStream

Testcontainers

Unix domain sockets

gRPC tooling

Job description

Orbis Operations, headquartered in McLean, VA, seeks a Senior Backend Engineer to drive the Catalyst platform's architecture and scalability. You will own medium-sized features end to end, design distributed systems, and lead performance improvements across pipelines.

You will work with product and engineering teams, implement core runtime features, and participate in on-call rotations with a focus on reliability and security in demanding environments. International travel is required up to 25%.