Senior Backend Engineer, Core APIs (SRE Focus)

About the Role

We are seeking a highly skilled Senior Backend Engineer with a strong focus on Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) to join our globally distributed team. This senior-level position is based in Saudi Arabia and offers a unique opportunity to design, develop, and operate high-performance backend systems that power real-time data services and APIs. Your work will directly impact the reliability, scalability, and cost-efficiency of critical infrastructure, ensuring seamless performance for businesses and users alike. This role blends hands-on backend engineering with SRE ownership, enabling you to shape the future of distributed systems while mentoring peers and driving engineering excellence.

Key Responsibilities

• Backend System Development: Architect, build, and optimize high-performance backend services, including real-time data processing and web APIs, with a focus on balancing reliability, latency, scalability, and infrastructure cost.
• Reliability Engineering: Define and own Service Level Indicators (SLIs), Service Level Objectives (SLOs), and error budgets for core API services. Leverage reliability data to guide engineering decisions and delivery strategies.
• Observability and Monitoring: Develop and maintain robust observability practices, including meaningful metrics, structured logging, distributed tracing, interactive dashboards, and actionable alerts to proactively identify and resolve issues.
• Incident Management: Participate in an equitable on-call rotation, respond swiftly to production incidents, mitigate customer impact, and lead blameless post-incident reviews to drive continuous improvement.
• Automation and Operational Efficiency: Automate repetitive operational tasks and follow through on incident action items to reduce toil and prevent recurring failures, ensuring systems remain resilient and scalable.
• Capacity Planning and Performance Tuning: Conduct capacity planning, load testing, and performance analysis to ensure systems can scale efficiently in response to growing demand.
• Troubleshooting and Problem Solving: Investigate complex production and product issues by developing hypotheses, running experiments, analyzing results, and translating findings into actionable engineering improvements.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Integrate backend components with other services and work closely with cross-functional teams to maintain high standards of performance, scalability, and reliability across the platform.
• Engineering Culture and Mentorship: Contribute to a data-driven, reliability-focused engineering culture by sharing best practices and improving development and operational processes. Mentor other engineers to foster technical growth and operational excellence.

Requirements

• Experience: Minimum of 5 years in backend software engineering, with substantial hands-on experience operating production systems that you have helped design and build.
• SRE Practices: Demonstrated experience with formal Site Reliability Engineering practices, including error budgets, capacity planning, production readiness reviews, and fault-injection or resilience testing.
• Programming Proficiency: Strong hands-on experience with Go and/or Node.js, with the flexibility and willingness to learn the other technology stack as needed.
• System Design: Proven ability to design, develop, and maintain scalable backend systems, APIs, microservices, and real-time data-processing services.
• Containerization and Orchestration: Practical experience running production workloads using Docker and Kubernetes or comparable containerization and orchestration technologies.
• Infrastructure as Code: Experience with infrastructure-as-code tools such as Terraform or AWS CloudFormation to manage and provision infrastructure efficiently.
• Observability Tools: Working knowledge of observability platforms such as Datadog, including service instrumentation, monitoring, logging, tracing, dashboard creation, and alerting.
• Incident Response: Experience participating in production on-call rotations, troubleshooting live incidents, mitigating customer impact, and conducting thorough post-incident analysis.
• Database Expertise: Strong SQL skills and experience working with databases or data stores such as DynamoDB, Redis, or Elasticsearch.
• Version Control: Familiarity with Git and shell scripting to streamline development workflows and operational tasks.

Why Join Us

This role offers a unique opportunity to work on cutting-edge backend systems that protect businesses and users from online fraud while driving innovation in reliability and scalability. As part of a fully remote, globally distributed team, you’ll collaborate asynchronously, contribute to engineering standards, and mentor peers—all while solving complex distributed-systems challenges. If you are passionate about building resilient, high-performance systems and thrive in a collaborative, data-driven environment, we encourage you to apply.