Senior Software Engineer

Fresh Consulting; Portland (OR); On-site; USD 103,000 - 117,000; Full time

Job summary

Fresh Consulting in Portland, OR is seeking an experienced Senior Software Engineer to help build distributed, AI-enabled systems. You will collaborate with our engineering team to drive technical innovation and mentor junior engineers, shaping architecture and best practices.

Responsibilities include designing microservices on Linux, implementing gRPC APIs with Protocol Buffers, building scalable data pipelines, and advancing observability, CI/CD, and containerized deployments.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of professional experience developing distributed backend systems on Linux.
• Deep curiosity for software and systems architecture topics.
• Expert-level Python programming and software architecture skills.
• Strong system design with a focus on API contracts and fault tolerance.
• Fluency operating in Linux environments - shell, logs, and process reasoning.
• Excellence in technical communication and documentation.

Responsibilities

• Contribute to the architecture and development of production-grade distributed microservice systems running on Linux
• Drive technical initiatives to advance service mesh, contract-first APIs, and inter-service communication patterns
• Build scalable data processing pipelines and high-throughput service infrastructure
• Design and evolve protobuf contracts and gRPC service definitions across the platform
• Provide technical guidance to junior team members

Skills

Distributed backend

Python expert

System design

Linux fluency

Technical comms

Tools

gRPC

Protocol Buffers

Docker

CI/CD

Bazel

Buck

Pants

Terraform

Ansible

Job description

We're seeking an experienced Senior Software Engineer to join our team in developing distributed, cutting-edge applied AI systems. This is a full-time position working directly with our engineering team to drive technical innovation and mentor mid-level and junior engineers.

What You'll Do

• Contribute to the architecture and development of production-grade distributed microservice systems running on Linux
• Drive technical initiatives to advance our service mesh, contract-first APIs, and inter-service communication patterns
• Build scalable data processing pipelines and high-throughput service infrastructure
• Design and evolve protobuf contracts and gRPC service definitions across the platform
• Provide technical guidance to junior team members

What We're Looking For

• 10+ years of professional experience developing distributed backend systems on Linux
• Deep curiosity for all software and systems architecture topics
• Expert-level Python programming and software architecture skills
• Strong system design skills with a focus on service boundaries, API contracts, and fault tolerance
• Fluency operating in Linux environments - comfortable living in the shell, reading logs, and reasoning about process, network, and filesystem behavior
• Excellence in technical communication and documentation

Required Technical Skills

• Expertise in prompt engineering and AI-assisted development as a daily practice - Claude Code, Augment, Copilot, or equivalent is a force multiplier in your workflow, not a novelty
• Expertise in designing and operating microservice architectures at scale
• Deep experience with gRPC and Protocol Buffers - schema evolution, streaming RPCs, interceptors, and contract-first development
• Proficiency with version control and CI/CD practices
• Experience with containerized deployments (Docker on Linux hosts), service discovery, and distributed computing
• Strong grasp of observability: distributed tracing, structured logging, and metrics

Highly Competitive Candidates Will Also Bring

• Previous experience in manufacturing, industrial automation, or quality control systems
• Experience with monorepo build systems (Bazel, Buck, Pants) and polyglot protobuf code generation
• Familiarity with backwards/forwards compatibility patterns and API versioning at scale
• Experience with real-time processing and edge computing constraints on resource-constrained Linux devices
• Experience with configuration management and infrastructure-as-code (Ansible, Terraform) for Linux fleet operations

Compensation offered will be determined by factors such as location, level, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. Range $75/hr - $85/hr.