Senior Backend Engineer – Scalable Distributed Systems (Go)

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

Benefits offered by this job

Health, Dental & Vision

Life Insurance

401k Matching

Unlimited PTO

Equity Package

Home Office Stipend

Global Entry

Parental Leave

Wellness Stipend

Job summary

HavocAI is seeking a Senior Backend Engineer to drive the development of scalable, high-performance backend systems powering our autonomous platforms in mission-critical environments. You will be hands-on in architecture and development as a senior individual contributor, designing and building highly concurrent, distributed services in Go.

You will work closely with frontend, platform, autonomy, and embedded teams to ensure reliable, secure operation across edge devices and cloud

Qualifications

• 6+ years of backend or distributed systems engineering experience.
• Strong Go expertise and building highly concurrent systems.
• Experience with highly available distributed systems at scale.
• Experience with consensus/coordination primitives (etcd, Raft, leader election).
• Strong API design and system architecture skills.
• Experience with Kubernetes and containerized environments.
• Understanding of performance optimization and data structures.
• Ability to drive projects from concept to production.
• Strong communication skills.
• U.S. citizenship and ability to obtain security clearance.

Responsibilities

• Technical Ownership: Drive execution and technical excellence across backend projects.
• Set engineering standards, conduct code reviews, and guide architectural decisions.
• Contribute to backend roadmap and delivery in partnership with product and engineering leadership.
• Foster a culture of ownership, quality, and continuous improvement.
• Backend Architecture & Development: Design, build, and maintain scalable, highly concurrent backend services in Go.
• Architect distributed systems that support high throughput, reliability, and real-time operations.
• Define service boundaries, APIs, and data models across systems.
• Design services for high availability and fault tolerance across availability zones.
• Evolve singleton services into multi-zone, distributed deployments.
• System Performance & Reliability: Optimize backend systems for performance, scalability, and resilience.
• Identify and resolve bottlenecks in distributed systems and concurrency-heavy workloads.
• Ensure systems meet high standards for uptime and operational reliability.
• Improve observability, maintainability, and operational readiness of backend services.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner with frontend, platform, autonomy, and embedded teams to integrate services across applications and devices.
• Support end-to-end system design from edge devices to cloud infrastructure.
• Contribute to system-level architecture across the stack.
• Help align backend capabilities with product, platform, and mission needs.
• Security & Best Practices: Enforce secure development practices across backend systems.
• Maintain high standards for code quality, testing, documentation, and reliability.
• Support technical reviews, design discussions, and production readiness efforts.
• Build systems with security, scalability, and long-term maintainability in mind.

Skills

Go

Distributed systems

Kubernetes

APIs & Architecture

High performance backend

Security clearance (US citizenship)

Tools

Etcd

Raft consensus

Cloud infrastructure (AWS)

Git

Job description

HavocAI is seeking a Senior Backend Engineer to drive the development of scalable, high-performance backend systems powering our autonomous platforms in mission-critical environments. You will be hands-on in architecture and development as a senior individual contributor, designing and building highly concurrent, distributed services in Go.

You will work closely with frontend, platform, autonomy, and embedded teams to ensure reliable, secure operation across edge devices and cloud