Senior Go Backend Architect — Distributed Platform Runtime

Orbis; McLean (VA); On-site; USD 140,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

PTO policy

Retirement matching

Comprehensive benefits package

Job summary

Orbis, based in McLean, VA, seeks a Senior Backend Software Engineer to progress Catalyst, our secure distributed data platform. You will drive architecture for critical interfaces, ensuring scalability and stability under load while tracing end-to-end request lifecycles.

Expert Go knowledge, distributed systems experience, gRPC, and testcontainers-based integration tests are essential; international travel up to 25% is required.

Qualifications

• 5-7 years of backend or platform engineering with ownership of meaningful product surfaces.
• Deep proficiency in Go, including concurrency patterns (goroutines, channels, cancelable contexts) and process management.
• Experience designing and consuming gRPC/protobuf service contracts across process boundaries.
• Hands-on experience implementing idempotent state machines and delivery guarantees in distributed pipelines.
• Experience with streaming or durable message systems (NATS JetStream), including backpressure and resource limits.
• Experience building integration test suites (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, from design through production rollout.
• 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, providing clear architectural rationale for high-impact design decisions.
• Partner with product and engineering stakeholders to refine requirements and deliver solutions that balance product vision with system integrity.
• Design and implement core runtime features, including supervised goroutine lifecycles, cancelable contexts, and subprocess supervision.
• Contribute to the evolution of core system components, including inter-service communication protocols, standardized data models, and distributed persistence layer.
• Define testing standards and shift testing left, including testcontainers-based end‑to‑end integration tests spanning the fleet manager and processing unit, and implement chaos engineering or property-based testing.
• Participate in on‑call rotation for the platform runtime and lead post‑mortems with actionable follow-ups for incidents.

Job description

Orbis, based in McLean, VA, seeks a Senior Backend Software Engineer to progress Catalyst, our secure distributed data platform. You will drive architecture for critical interfaces, ensuring scalability and stability under load while tracing end-to-end request lifecycles.

Expert Go knowledge, distributed systems experience, gRPC, and testcontainers-based integration tests are essential; international travel up to 25% is required.