Top Backend Engineer Jobs in Seattle, WA

Design, implement, test, debug, and operate scalable backend services such as identity, friend graph, and persistence systems. Collaborate across teams to deliver product solutions while maintaining availability, scalability, security, operational excellence, and cost efficiency. Investigate incidents and hotfixes, apply distributed-systems best practices, and use AI-assisted development tools while auditing output for quality and security.

Design, implement, operate, and scale critical backend services, including identity, social graph, and persistence systems. Collaborate across teams to deliver product solutions, ensure availability and operational excellence, test and debug code, and participate in incident resolution. The role requires technical leadership, distributed-systems expertise, and effective use of AI development tools while maintaining security, performance, and production-quality standards.

Architect and operate Affirm’s large-scale Amazon EKS compute platform, including cluster lifecycle, node management, autoscaling, shared components, infrastructure automation, workload safety policies, observability, cost and capacity optimization, and self-service workflows. The role drives technical strategy, mentors engineers, partners cross-functionally, and participates in on-call incident response.

Lead the architecture and technical strategy for Affirm’s high-volume observability platform. Design telemetry pipelines and sampling strategies, improve reliability and cost efficiency, integrate observability into AI-assisted development, and drive platform adoption across engineering teams. Remain hands-on while mentoring six engineers, leading cross-functional initiatives, establishing engineering standards, and overseeing monitoring, alerting, on-call operations, and system availability.

Build and operate high-throughput backend services for AI agents, calendar, scheduling, integrations, real-time data pipelines, and APIs. Design platform infrastructure, event-driven systems, and client-server protocols using Go, PostgreSQL, Kubernetes, and cloud platforms. Collaborate with AI, product, and frontend teams, improve reliability through testing and infrastructure as code, and mentor junior engineers.

In this role, you'll ensure the reliability and scalability of the NG-SIEM platform, manage incident responses, and collaborate across teams to enhance system performance.

Build and operate GitLab’s Rust-based Knowledge Graph backend supporting SDLC and code indexing, graph queries, MCP endpoints, AI agents, and analytics. Integrate with Rails, ClickHouse, NATS JetStream, and Data Insights systems. Improve reliability, observability, scalability, and operational readiness through testing, metrics, runbooks, alerts, and on-call participation. Collaborate asynchronously across product, data, infrastructure, security, and AI teams while contributing to system design and occasional Ruby or frontend work.

Build and enforce workload safety standards across Affirm’s Amazon EKS fleet. Responsibilities include Kubernetes resource management, workload isolation, disruption handling, cluster capacity analysis, policy automation, production debugging, incident response, fleet-wide rollouts, technical leadership, mentoring, and measuring infrastructure impacts on availability, latency, risk, and cost.

Own and deliver highly available, low-latency backend identity systems supporting consumer onboarding, authentication, and verification. Lead quarterly team goals, guide engineers through ambiguous problems, collaborate with product and design partners, monitor system reliability, improve engineering standards, support on-call operations, and mentor team members. The role requires designing and launching distributed systems at scale using Python or Kotlin, AWS, MySQL, and Kubernetes.

Build and ship backend features end-to-end using Ruby on Rails and SQL. Lead complex technical projects, solve architecture challenges, establish standards, conduct meaningful code reviews, resolve high-risk bugs, document systems, collaborate across engineering teams, and mentor junior engineers.

Leads architecture and hands-on development of scalable backend systems and APIs supporting real-time applications. Owns the engineering lifecycle, writes high-performance code, establishes testing and reliability practices, resolves production issues, guides technical roadmaps, collaborates cross-functionally, and mentors engineers. The role requires expertise in object-oriented backend development, distributed cloud systems, automated testing, system monitoring, and technical leadership.

Lead technical vision and strategy for Affirm’s Cards backend engineering organization. Architect scalable and reliable platforms, guide cross-team initiatives, champion AI adoption and engineering excellence, influence technical roadmaps, and mentor engineers through Staff level. The role requires strong architectural expertise, organizational leadership, project management, communication, and cross-functional collaboration.

Own and deliver backend lakehouse infrastructure goals, lead engineers through complex problems, and build highly available distributed data systems. Collaborate with product, design, analytics, and engineering stakeholders; define scalable technical solutions; improve code quality and engineering standards; monitor operational health; support on-call responsibilities; and mentor team members.

Design, build, deploy, and operate highly available, large-scale telemetry and observability services. Build APIs, tools, and subsystems for collection, routing, storage, and data access. Improve reliability, security, and platform intelligence (including machine-learning features), participate in on-call and incident response, and collaborate across teams to deliver end-to-end solutions and AI-assisted operational capabilities.

Build and scale secure backend microservices for payments, disbursements, and governance, risk, and compliance workflows. Design distributed systems capable of handling millions of daily requests using Google Cloud and modern infrastructure tools. Collaborate with product, operations, and compliance teams, mentor junior engineers, and improve platform capabilities through analytics and user feedback. The role requires strong software engineering fundamentals, REST API experience, fintech or financial systems knowledge, and familiarity with event-driven and hexagonal architectures.

Build and scale secure backend microservices for payments, disbursements, or governance, risk, and compliance. Design distributed systems handling millions of daily requests, integrate Google Cloud services, implement financial and compliance workflows, and maintain high performance and security. Collaborate with product, operations, and compliance teams, mentor junior engineers, and continuously improve platform capabilities through analytics and user feedback.

Build and scale backend microservices for payments, disbursements, or governance, risk, and compliance systems. Design secure, high-performance distributed infrastructure using Google Cloud and modern engineering practices. Develop REST services, support financial workflows, collaborate across product and compliance teams, mentor junior engineers, and continuously improve platform capabilities. The role requires experience with fintech applications, payment or compliance systems, security, KYC/AML, and scalable web services.

Build and scale backend microservices for payments, disbursements, or governance, risk, and compliance systems. Design secure, high-performance financial infrastructure using Google Cloud and distributed-system technologies. Develop REST services, support transaction processing, onboarding, KYC, and compliance workflows, and collaborate cross-functionally with product, operations, and compliance teams. Mentor junior engineers, improve engineering practices, and iterate on platform capabilities using analytics and user feedback.

Design and implement an LLVM-based backend JIT compiler for NVIDIA GPUs. Develop compiler passes and optimizations, focusing on high performance and low compile time. Collaborate with hardware, compiler, and application teams to resolve issues and influence future GPU architectures.

Design, implement, operate, and scale critical backend services such as identity, social graph, and persistence systems. Collaborate across teams to deliver product solutions, test and debug code, and apply best practices for availability, scalability, security, operational excellence, and cost management. Independently deliver medium-sized features, support incident resolution, and use AI tools responsibly to improve development workflows while maintaining production-quality standards.

Build and maintain scalable backend messaging services supporting Teams and Copilot. Responsibilities include coding, architecture, testing, debugging, deployment automation, security hardening, telemetry, reliability engineering, incident response, and on-call support. The engineer collaborates with product, security, privacy, data science, and partner teams to deliver globally distributed services with strong performance, resiliency, compliance, and privacy protections.

Lead fraud decisioning engineering initiatives by architecting, building, launching, and maintaining complex backend systems. Drive cross-functional projects from definition through monitoring, write high-quality and resilient code, review technical work, mentor engineers, collaborate with Product, ML, Analytics, and Business teams, and contribute to hiring and interview design.

Develop backend tools and systems that improve batch development, testing, workflow efficiency, and reliability. Collaborate with product, infrastructure, design, and analytics teams; break projects into deliverable phases; build scalable, well-tested code; monitor metrics; support system availability and on-call operations; debug code; conduct reviews; and contribute to engineering growth and hiring activities.

Design, deliver, and operate scalable .NET Core backend services and APIs for an AI-driven advertising platform. Lead technical design, improve reliability and observability, conduct post-mortems, review code, mentor engineers, document architecture, and collaborate with Product and Engineering leadership. The role focuses on distributed systems, high-throughput workloads, partner integrations, performance, security, and platform growth.

Design and evolve high-scale backend capabilities for GitLab’s container registry. Drive architecture, performance, reliability, security, APIs, testing, and operational readiness. Mentor engineers, influence technical direction, participate in incident response, and collaborate asynchronously across product, infrastructure, data, frontend, and security teams. Integrate and evaluate agentic AI systems in production engineering workflows while promoting responsible and effective use.