Senior Backend Engineer - Mobile API & Platform

Socket.dev; San Mateo (CA); Hybrid; USD 176,000 - 220,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive base salary

Equity package

401K matching

Healthcare plans

Professional development reimbursement

Hybrid work schedule

Job summary

Slickdeals is seeking a Senior II Backend Engineer to provide technical leadership and API support for iOS and Android apps. You will own complex backend initiatives, shape architectural direction, and collaborate with Mobile, Web, Product, Design, and Platform teams to deliver reliable, scalable consumer experiences.

The ideal candidate brings deep backend expertise, refactors legacy systems, and demonstrates strong API, performance, and security capabilities in a fast-moving environment.

Qualifications

• Experience supporting large-scale iOS and Android apps.
• Backend development with PHP and modern PHP frameworks.
• Designing and operating high-traffic RESTful or GraphQL APIs.
• Understanding API contracts, versioning, caching, and error handling.
• Performance tuning for APIs with relational databases (MySQL/PostgreSQL).
• Secure authentication and authorization (JWT or similar).
• Experience with distributed systems (RabbitMQ, Kafka, Redis).
• Mobile push integrations (FCM, APNs) and testing strategies.
• Cloud, containers, Docker/Kubernetes, CI/CD (GitHub Actions).
• Observability: monitoring, logging, incident response, RCA.
• Experience with A/B testing, analytics, and feature flags.
• Ability to lead projects across teams and communicate tradeoffs.

Responsibilities

• Lead design and delivery of complex APIs and backend services for mobile apps.
• Own backend initiatives from discovery through rollout and support.
• Define API contracts, dependencies, and release strategies with mobile teams.
• Influence backend architecture and establish reusable patterns.
• Identify risks and present options and tradeoffs to partners.
• Improve reliability, scalability, and observability of mobile-facing services.
• Lead design reviews, raise engineering standards, and code reviews.
• Diagnose production issues spanning mobile, APIs, data services, and infra.
• Reduce technical debt and simplify legacy systems while delivering features.
• Contribute to cross-platform web API development as needed.

Skills

Backend leadership

API design

Performance optimization

Security best practices

Debugging

Communication

Tools

PHP

RESTful APIs

GraphQL

JWT

Redis

Kafka

RabbitMQ

Docker

Kubernetes

GitHub Actions

MySQL

PostgreSQL

Firebase Cloud Messaging

APNs

Job description

Slickdeals is seeking a Senior II Backend Engineer to provide technical leadership and API support for iOS and Android apps. You will own complex backend initiatives, shape architectural direction, and collaborate with Mobile, Web, Product, Design, and Platform teams to deliver reliable, scalable consumer experiences.

The ideal candidate brings deep backend expertise, refactors legacy systems, and demonstrates strong API, performance, and security capabilities in a fast-moving environment.