Senior Backend Engineer, Core APIs (SRE Focus)

Job Description

Senior Backend Engineer, Core APIs (SRE Focus)

We are seeking an experienced Senior Software Engineer to help build and operate the end-to-end fraud detection systems behind our Core APIs. Your primary responsibility will be building highly performant backend systems and keeping them reliable at scale. This is a hybrid backend/SRE role: you'll write the services and you'll own how they behave in production.

This role requires strong experience in backend software development, particularly API development and scaling existing systems in both Go and Node.js, paired with a genuine interest in reliability engineering. You'll design and implement scalable, high-performance backend systems, maintain their SLOs, and take ownership of features from concept through deployment and steady-state operation.

A key aspect of this role involves a deep understanding of scaling and operating distributed systems, allowing us to multiply our capacity safely and efficiently as our user base continues to grow rapidly.

What you'll do:

• Design, develop, and optimize backend systems for real-time data processing and web services, with reliability, latency, and cost as first-class design constraints.
• Define and own SLIs and SLOs for Core API services, and use error budgets to make concrete tradeoffs between shipping velocity and stability.
• Build and maintain the observability that makes these systems debuggable: Meaningful metrics, structured logging, distributed tracing, and alerts that fire on user-visible symptoms rather than noise.
• Participate in a shared on-call rotation, act as an effective responder during incidents, and lead blameless postmortems. The schedule will be communicated in advance, and we strive to balance coverage equitably while minimizing off-hours disruptions.
• Drive down operational toil by automating recurring manual work, and close the loop on incident action items so the same failure doesn't happen twice.
• Conduct capacity planning, load testing, and performance tuning to ensure the platform scales ahead of demand.
• Conduct deep dives into problematic features, researching and analyzing their behavior to understand root causes and identify potential solutions. Develop hypotheses, run experiments, analyze results, and translate findings into actionable engineering improvements.
• Work with cross-functional teams to integrate backend components with other services, ensuring performance and scalability.
• Foster a data-driven, reliability-minded culture by sharing engineering best practices and collaborating on cross-functional projects.
• Mentor other developers, helping all team members grow in our mission, values, and abilities.

What you bring:

• 5+ years of experience in backend development, including meaningful time operating what you built in production.
• Formal SRE practice experience — error budget policies, capacity models, production readiness reviews, chaos or fault-injection testing.
• Strong, demonstrated experience in GoLang and/or Node.js with a willingness to learn.
• Strong experience in designing, developing, and maintaining scalable backend systems.
• Experience with building and optimizing APIs, real-time data processing systems, and microservices architectures.
• Hands-on experience running production services on containerization and orchestration technologies such as Docker and Kubernetes.
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code tools like Terraform or AWS CloudFormation.
• Working fluency with observability tooling such as Datadog or comparable monitoring, logging, and tracing platforms — including instrumenting services and building useful dashboards and alerts.
• Experience participating in an on-call rotation: triaging live incidents, mitigating impact, and writing up what happened afterward.
• Strong knowledge of SQL and experience with databases like DynamoDB, Redis, or Elasticsearch.
• Proficiency with general software engineering tools: Git, IDEs, shell scripting, CI/CD.
• Proficient in English for clear communication in a global, remote team.
• Ability to work independently on tasks while effectively collaborating as a team member.
• A strong desire to mentor and grow junior team members.

Nice to Have:

• BS/MS in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent work experience.
• Practical experience with analytical storage systems like ClickHouse, Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, or Databricks.
• Experience with performance profiling and cost optimization of high-throughput cloud workloads.
• Experience working with large open-source projects to address the needs of a wide variety of stakeholders, and demonstrated ability to work and communicate asynchronously across a world-wide team.
• Demonstrated experience with both Node.js and Go in a backend context.
• Excellent understanding of Internet security & privacy mechanisms.

Tools and Technologies:

• Backend development: Golang and NodeJS (Preferred), TypeScript, Express or equivalent.
• Infrastructure and delivery: AWS, Terraform, Docker, Kubernetes, CI/CD pipelines.
• Observability: Datadog, metrics/logging/tracing.
• Data analytics/processing: ClickHouse, dbt.

Compensation & Transparency

At Fingerprint, we believe in pay transparency — it's part of how we operate as a distributed, remote-first team. Salaries are based on function, level, and geographic location, benchmarked against similar stage growth companies.

Because this role is open across the United States and can be based anywhere our team members work from, the salary range reflects that geographic breadth: $152k - $205k

Some example salaries for specific locations are below:

NYC: $178k - $205k

Chicago: $152k - $174k

Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors, including the successful candidate's location, experience, and expertise, and may vary from the amounts listed above.

Due to regulatory and security reasons, there’s a small number of countries where we cannot have Fingerprint teammates based. Additionally, because Fingerprint is an all-remote company and people can join our workforce from almost any country, we do not sponsor visas. Fingerprint teammates need to be authorized to work from their home location.

We are dedicated to creating an inclusive work environment for everyone. We embrace and celebrate the unique experiences, perspectives and cultural backgrounds that each employee brings to our workplace. Fingerprint strives to foster an environment where our employees feel respected, valued and empowered, and our team members are at the forefront in helping us promote and sustain an inclusive workplace. We highly encourage people from underrepresented groups in tech to apply.

If you are applying as a resident of California, please read our CCPA notice here.

If you are applying as a resident of the EU, please read our GDPR notice here.

**We have noticed a rise in recruiting impersonations across the industry, where scammers attempt to access candidates' personal and financial information through fake interviews and offers. All Fingerprint recruiting email communications will always come from the @fingerprint.com domain. Any outreach claiming to be from Fingerprint via other sources should be ignored.