Lead Backend Engineer

Job Description

As a Lead Engineer, you will be the primary architect and steward of our "Identity-as-a-Service" platform, the bedrock upon which every other product team builds.

This isn't just about managing logins; it’s about ensuring that our entire ecosystem is secure, performant, and seamlessly integrated. You will lead the team responsible for the critical infrastructure that handles User Management, SSO, EntraID, and our Public API. Your mission is to ensure that while the product scales, our "base" remains rock-solid, providing high throughput and millisecond-latency for our most critical services. If you thrive on solving complex distributed systems problems and take pride in enabling other engineers to move faster, this role is for you.

Candidates must be located within driving distance from our Baltimore HQ.

A Day in the Life:

• Architect Core Services: Design and evolve the platform’s "Identity-as-a-Service" layer, ensuring high availability and consistency across user onboarding, SSO, and API key management.
• Optimize High-Scale Systems: Build and maintain data retrieval systems capable of accessing millions of records in milliseconds.
• Drive Reliability & SLAs: Implement rigorous monitoring, alerting, and performance tuning to meet and exceed strict reliability and low-latency targets.
• Lead API Strategy: Own the development and lifecycle of our Public API, ensuring it is intuitive for customers and robust under heavy load.
• Set the Engineering Standard: Serve as a technical mentor and example for the broader engineering organization, championing best practices in asynchronous communication and system design.
• Innovate through Infrastructure: Strategically utilize caching layers and database optimizations to solve for high-concurrency challenges

Required Skills & Abilities:

• Node.js & PHP Ecosystems: Expert-level proficiency in Node.js for building high-concurrency services, paired with professional experience in PHP to manage and migrate legacy logic.
• High-Performance Database Architecture: Mastery of Relational Databases (PostgreSQL/MySQL), specifically in designing schemas that maintain strict ACID compliance.Proven ability to execute zero-downtime migrations and complex query optimizations that reduce CPU/IO overhead.
• Sub-Millisecond Caching Strategy: Deep experience with Redis or Memcached to build "speed layers" for notification systems and session management. Sophisticated understanding ofcache invalidation patterns to ensure data consistency across a distributed environment.
• Distributed Systems & Scalability: Practical experience implementing Read/Write splitting, horizontal sharding, and multi-region failover to ensure "five nines" (99.999%) availability. Architectural fluency in the CAP Theorem, with the ability to make informed trade-offs between strong and eventual consistency based on the specific needs of Identity vs. Reporting.
• Asynchronous Data & Eventual Consistency: Expertise in Event-Driven Architecture using message brokers like Kafka or RabbitMQ to handle high-volume data flows. Experience implementing Change Data Capture (CDC) or similar patterns to synchronize platform usage data with external CRM systems like Salesforce without impacting core service performance.
• Identity & Security Protocols: Comprehensive knowledge of SSO (EntraID/Azure AD), OAuth2, and OpenID Connect, with a focus on secure, high-throughput API Key management.
• Observability-Driven Development: A "monitor-first" mindset, using tools to track database contention, connection pooling, and latency bottlenecks before they impact the end user.
• Experience using AI tools: we are an AI first company and you should be comfortable using AI to code, debug and gather information from multiple sources.

Desired Skills:

• Experience transitioning legacy PHP services into modern Node.js microservices.
• Familiarity with event-driven architectures and message brokers (e.g., Kafka, RabbitMQ).
• Prior experience in a "Platform" or "Foundations" team where your primary customers were other internal developers.

Education & Experience:

• Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Software Engineering or related field. Equivalent experience may substitute for education.
• 6+ years of related experience

Alertus Career Advantages:

• Unlimited Paid Time Off
• Paid Holidays
• 401(k) Retirement Plan
• Medical, Dental, and Vision Plans
• Short-term Disability, Accident, Hospital, and Cancer Insurance
• Live Near Your Work HomeBuying Incentive
• Employee Referral Bonuses
• Flex Scheduling