Senior Backend Engineer (Java/Scala)

Title: Senior Backend Engineer (Java/Scala)Location : Greenwood Village CO (Onsite)About the RoleWe're looking for a senior engineer who doesn't just write code - they own outcomes. You'll be responsible for the full lifecycle of backend services: from design and development through production reliability. In an era where AI can generate code, we value engineers who think critically, anticipate problems, and drive systems forward.What We ExpectEnd-to-End OwnershipOwn features from design -> development -> testing -> deployment -> production supportTake accountability for the reliability and performance of your services in productionDrive technical decisions without waiting to be told what to doSystem Design & ArchitectureDesign scalable, resilient distributed systems handling millions of daily transactionsMake pragmatic trade-off decisions (consistency vs. availability, complexity vs. speed)Produce clear technical design documents and lead design reviewsEvaluate build vs. buy decisions with dataDevelopmentStrong proficiency in Java and/or ScalaBuild high-throughput, low-latency microservicesWrite clean, maintainable code - but more importantly, know when and what to buildTesting & QualityWrite meaningful unit, integration, and contract tests - not just for coverage metricsOwn E2E test strategy for your servicesBuild confidence in deployments through automated validationInfrastructure & Cloud (AWS)Hands-on with AWS services (ECS/EKS, Lambda, S3, SQS, CloudWatch, IAM)Understand networking, security, and cost implications of architectural choicesComfortable with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform/CloudFormation)Data & MessagingKafka - design event-driven architectures, manage topics, handle consumer lag and rebalancingRedis - caching strategies, pub/sub, cluster managementMongoDB/DocumentDB - schema design, indexing, query optimization, aggregation pipelinesMonitoring & ObservabilityDatadog - build dashboards, set meaningful alerts, track SLOs, analyze APM tracesSplunk - log analysis, search queries, correlation across services for incident investigationUnderstand distributed tracing, structured logging, and metric-driven decision makingSRE MindsetAnalyze production incidents: read logs, trace requests, identify root cause under pressureThink about failure modes before they happen (circuit breakers, retries, fallbacks, graceful degradation)Participate in on-call rotations and drive blameless post-mortemsProactively identify capacity risks and performance bottlenecksProactive Analysis & InnovationIdentify risks, tech debt, and performance bottlenecks before they become incidentsPropose and drive improvements - don't wait for a ticketStay current with industry trends and bring relevant ideas to the teamChallenge existing patterns when they no longer serve the systemWhat This Role is NOTA pure coding role - AI can write code; we need engineers who decide what to build and whyA ticket-taker role - you identify work, not just execute itA siloed role - you'll collaborate across teams, influence architecture, and mentor othersNice to HaveExperience with circuit breaker patterns (Hystrix, Resilience4j)Performance tuning at scale (JVM, GC, thread pools, connection pools)Experience with CI/CD pipelines and deployment strategies (blue-green, canary)Contributions to internal tooling or developer experience improvementsExperience leading technical initiatives across multiple teams

Created: 2026-05-15