Staff Backend Software Engineer

Jobtailor; Arizona; On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Jobtailor in Arizona seeks a Senior Backend Engineer to lead design and implementation of scalable RESTful APIs and distributed systems. You will own reliability, performance, and data processing across PostgreSQL, Redis, and cloud storage.

You will drive infrastructure changes with Terraform and AWS, enhance observability, and mentor teams while shaping best practices for secure, scalable backend software.

Qualifications

• Minimum 10+ years of backend engineering experience or equivalent depth.

Responsibilities

• Lead design and implementation of RESTful APIs and Celery workers for publishing, media processing, SSAI/VAST workflows, imports, and reporting.

Skills

Python Expertise

RESTful API Design

Celery Experience

AWS Infrastructure Experience

PostgreSQL Proficiency

GCP Experience

Redis Experience

Terraform

CI/CD

Docker

Security Best Practices

Tools

Terraform

AWS

GCP

Redis

PostgreSQL

Docker

GitHub Actions

Elastic Beanstalk

Job description

• Lead design and implementation of RESTful APIs and Celery asynchronous workers for publishing, media processing, SSAI/VAST workflows, imports, and reporting
• Own reliability and performance of distributed systems and workloads, including queue design, deduplication, dispatch patterns, prefetch tuning, backpressure, and operational logging
• Drive data and integration decisions across PostgreSQL, Redis, object storage, and data-warehouse-backed reporting
• Lead or significantly contribute to Terraform and AWS changes involving Elastic Beanstalk tiers, IAM, networking, WAF, rate limits, observability hooks, and phased rollouts
• Improve observability through structured logging, Prometheus-style metrics, Grafana, CloudWatch, and actionable on-call alarms
• Define and evolve testing strategies for critical paths, CI checks, and operational readiness for risky migrations
• Represent backend concerns in planning, design reviews, and incident discussions
• Propose phased migrations, safer defaults, and maintainable long-term solutions
• Establish best practices for AI-assisted coding tools and responsible AI usage across backend teams
• Guide AI applications in system design, performance tuning, anomaly detection, developer tools, workflows, and observability

Requirements

• 10+ years of professional backend or backend-heavy engineering experience, or equivalent depth
• Strong Python expertise and experience designing service-oriented systems
• Experience with APIs, background jobs, idempotency, failure modes, and capacity planning
• Deep hands-on experience with Celery or similar systems and AMQP/RabbitMQ-class message brokers
• Strong SQL and PostgreSQL experience
• Practical Redis experience with coordination, rate limiting, circuit breaking, and concurrency correctness
• Substantial GCP and AWS infrastructure experience, including AWS services such as EC2, ALB, IAM, CloudWatch, S3, RDS, and proxy patterns
• Experience leading Terraform changes
• Substantial cloud CI/CD experience
• Security-minded engineering experience, including IAM, TLS, network egress, WAF, and rate limiting
• Experience establishing engineering standards, component architectures, and development best practices
• TypeScript, REST, JSON, gRPC, schema validation, Docker, containers, Elastic Beanstalk, Prometheus, Grafana, CloudWatch, structured logging, pytest, Git, and GitHub Actions/workflow-style CI/CD
• Excellent judgment, written communication, cross-team alignment, and influence without authority
• Experience in early-stage startup or rapidly evolving environments
• Container deployment and multi-cloud networking are a strong plus
• Authorization at scale is a strong plus
• Media, entertainment, creator economy, CTV, OTT, SSAI, VAST, CDN, or edge-processing experience is nice to have
• Druid, BigQuery, or experience with large analytical query constraints is nice to have

Core Competencies

Demonstrates extensive expertise in backend engineering, particularly in designing and implementing RESTful APIs, managing distributed systems, and optimizing performance across cloud infrastructures. Proficient in Python, SQL, and various cloud services, with a strong focus on security and best practices in software development.

Highest-signal resume keywords

• Python Expertise
• RESTful API Design
• Celery Experience
• AWS Infrastructure Experience
• PostgreSQL Proficiency

ATS Optimization Keywords

Hard Skills

• Backend Engineering
• Service-Oriented Systems
• APIs
• SQL
• Celery
• Redis
• Terraform
• CI/CD
• Docker
• TypeScript

Soft Skills

• Excellent Judgment
• Written Communication
• Cross-Team Alignment
• Influence Without Authority

Industry Keywords

• Media
• Entertainment
• Creator Economy
• CTC
• OTT
• SSAI
• VAST
• CDN
• Edge-Processing

Tools & Technologies

• AWS
• GCP
• Prometheus
• Grafana
• CloudWatch
• Elastic Beanstalk
• Git
• GitHub Actions