Staff Software Engineer - Backend Development
First seen by Alion on Nov 3, 2026.
Job Description :
Design and deliver robust, production-grade and data-intensive applications that power business-critical use cases around the globe. In this role, you will operate across domains - owning architecture, raising engineering standards, and amplifying the impact of your team and the surrounding teams. Your responsibility spans backend services, cloud-native infrastructure, and data engineering, with a focus on building scalable, reliable, and maintainable systems.
A key success factor in this role is not only technical expertise, but to be able to understand and translate complex business requirements into scalable systems. The expectation is that you identify problems and opportunities, design solutions for them and implement them together with the team.
Qualifications :
Bachelor's degree in computer science, Computer Engineering, relevant technical field, or equivalent; Master's degree preferred.
Roles and Responsibility :
- Design and own end-to-end architectures across microservices, event-driven systems, and data platforms.
- Build and deliver high-quality backend services and APIs that are reliable, secure, and scalable.
- Design and operate cloud-native infrastructure on Kubernetes, applying platform engineering best practices.
- Build and maintain data pipelines and products on Spark and Databricks where required.
- Drive event-driven architecture using Kafka and streaming technologies.
- Write clean, testable, and maintainable software - primarily in Scala with Python where appropriate.
- Lead architecture and design reviews; author lightweight design documents for major decisions.
- Define and improve engineering standards across testing, observability, CI/CD, and reliability.
- Coach and mentor engineers at multiple levels through reviews, design sessions, and pairing.
- Build observability into systems from day one (logs, metrics, tracing, alerting, SLOs).
- Deliver through CI/CD with safe release, rollback, and progressive delivery strategies.
Skills :
- 8+ years of professional software engineering experience across backend, platform and or data domains.
- Strong programming skills in Scala or Java (Scala preferred); other languages are a plus.
- Proven experience building distributed microservices and event-driven systems ideally in the Scala / JVM ecosystem (we use KStreams, Flink, cats-effect, fs2 and tapir).
- Hands-on experience with Kafka in production at scale.
- Solid experience designing and developing APIs (REST and/or event-driven interfaces).
- Strong knowledge of relational databases (e.g. PostgreSQL), data modeling, and query optimization.
- Experience building distributed data pipelines with Spark and/or Databricks.
- Demonstrated ability to lead technical design and architecture decisions across teams.
- Experience mentoring and growing engineers.
Good To Have :
- Working knowledge of Kubernetes - workloads, networking, Helm, scaling, and operational practices.
- Experience with data governance, lakehouse table formats (Delta, Iceberg), and modern data platforms.
- Experience with platform engineering - building developer platforms, golden paths, or internal tooling.
- Performance profiling and JVM tuning experience.
- Experience with MLOps or data science platform integrations.
Skills
Scala, Java, Kafka, Spark, Microservices Architecture, Backend Architecture, Distributed Systems