Senior Backend Engineer — Scalable Systems & AI Workflows

Chegg; United States; Hybrid; USD 42,000 - 84,000; Full time

Job summary

Chegg Skills is hiring a Senior Software Engineer, Backend, to own design, reliability, and scalability of backend services and APIs. You will build robust distributed systems, orchestration workflows, and backend infrastructure powering learner-facing experiences.

This is a backend-first role with some full-stack reach. You will contribute to AI-assisted backend features, collaborate with Product, Data Engineering, Platform/SRE, and Content Operations, and ship end-to-end changes across

Qualifications

• 7+ years of professional software development experience building production backend systems.
• Strong backend system design experience with distributed systems, scalability, reliability patterns, and service architecture.
• Experience with Java/Kotlin and/or Python-based backend systems (Spring, FastAPI, Django, or similar) and API design with GraphQL integration.
• Experience with workflow orchestration systems (Temporal, AWS Step Functions, Airflow, or similar).
• Experience debugging production issues end-to-end, with retries, timeouts, idempotency, and workflow/state handling.
• Strong testing and release-validation discipline; observability and on-call ownership.
• Comfort using AI-assisted development tools and contributing to AI-enabled backend features.
• Exposure to React/Next.js or frontend web apps to support full-stack changes.
• Familiarity with LLM APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic, etc.) or agentic workflow patterns.

Responsibilities

• Design and build backend services and distributed systems focused on scalability, reliability, and maintainability.
• Develop GraphQL-powered APIs and workflow-driven systems for learner-facing and operational experiences.
• Improve robustness of async/integration-heavy workflows with retries, idempotency, and error handling.
• Enhance operational readiness with dashboards, alerts, runbooks, and on-call support.

Skills

7+ years exp

Backend design

Java/Kotlin

Python

GraphQL API

Temporal workflow

Observability

AI tools

Full-stack exposure

On-call

Tools

Spring

FastAPI

Django

Temporal

AWS

Docker

Job description

Chegg Skills is hiring a Senior Software Engineer, Backend, to own design, reliability, and scalability of backend services and APIs. You will build robust distributed systems, orchestration workflows, and backend infrastructure powering learner-facing experiences.

This is a backend-first role with some full-stack reach. You will contribute to AI-assisted backend features, collaborate with Product, Data Engineering, Platform/SRE, and Content Operations, and ship end-to-end changes across