Senior Platform Backend Engineer: APIs & Tooling

Alkira, Inc.; United States; On-site; USD 85,000 - 155,000; Full time

Job summary

Alkira, a Lumen company, is seeking a Senior Platform Services Software Engineer to design and build core platform capabilities used by multiple engineering teams. The role focuses on backend services, APIs, and tooling, not customer-facing features, with ownership of complex projects from design through production support.

You will work with Golang, build cloud-native microservices over gRPC/Protobuf, and mentor others through code reviews and standards.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience building production-scale applications and services.
• Strong proficiency in Golang with experience developing production-quality backend systems.
• Experience designing APIs, microservices, and distributed systems.
• Experience with Linux development environments, debugging, and troubleshooting.
• Experience building cloud deployments on GCP, AWS, or Azure.
• Strong communication, collaboration, and problem-solving skills.

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, test, and maintain scalable backend services, APIs, and platform capabilities using Golang.
• Build cloud-native microservices and distributed primitives consumed by other engineering teams, over gRPC and Protobuf.
• Build and maintain the platform tooling other teams are using and treat their ergonomics as part of the product.
• Own complex features from design through implementation, deployment, and production support.
• Contribute to architectural decisions that improve scalability, reliability, performance, and maintainability across every team depending on the platform.
• Diagnose and resolve complex software issues across Linux-based development and production environments.
• Turn recurring patterns across teams into shared capability rather than repeated one-off support.
• Mentor engineers through code review and technical guidance, and contribute to development standards, automated testing, and security review of Platform-owned services.
• Participate in the on-call rotation for the services you own.

Skills

Golang

Backend development

API design

Distributed systems

Linux development

Cloud platforms

Communication

Mentoring

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science/Engineering or related technical field

Tools

Kubernetes

Docker

gRPC

Protobuf

SDKs/CLIs

Job description

Alkira, a Lumen company, is seeking a Senior Platform Services Software Engineer to design and build core platform capabilities used by multiple engineering teams. The role focuses on backend services, APIs, and tooling, not customer-facing features, with ownership of complex projects from design through production support.

You will work with Golang, build cloud-native microservices over gRPC/Protobuf, and mentor others through code reviews and standards.