Software Development Engineer II - Backend
First seen by Alion on Nov 5, 2026.
Software Development Engineer II (SDE 2)
We're hiring an SDE 2 for our core product engineering team. You'll own pieces of our backend and web platform from the first design sketch to production, and you'll help the engineers around you get better along the way. If you've shipped real software for a couple of years and you're ready for bigger problems, this role is for you.
What you'll do:
- Own features and services end to end. Work with product to understand the problem, design the solution, build it, ship it, and keep watching it once it's live.
- Write the low-level design for what you build and join high-level design discussions. Put your thinking in short design docs, including the trade-offs and what could go wrong.
- Build and maintain high-throughput backend services and web applications with clean, tested, maintainable code.
- Track down performance problems in production: slow queries, hot paths, poor caching, services that fall over under load. Fix them properly, not just for today.
- Review code carefully and mentor SDE 1s and interns. Pair with them, explain your reasoning, and unblock them when they're stuck.
- Work with Product Managers, QA and senior engineers to scope and estimate work honestly, and raise risks early.
- Share in on-call, and help write up and fix the root causes after incidents.
- Help us improve how we build: better tests, smoother CI/CD, less friction for the team.
What we're looking for:
- A Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology or a related field.
- 3 - 8 years of experience building production software, ideally at a product company, including at least a couple of significant features or services that were yours.
- Strong skills in at least one of Java, Python, Go, Node.js or C++, and comfort with the frameworks around it.
- Solid grasp of data structures, algorithms and OOP. You can work through medium to hard problems and explain your approach.
- System design experience. You can produce a sound low-level design on your own and contribute to high-level design. You understand caching, queues, load, consistency and how systems fail.
- Real depth with databases: schema design, indexing and query tuning in MySQL or PostgreSQL, plus working knowledge of a NoSQL store like MongoDB. Some familiarity with replication and scaling is a plus.
- Experience designing clean REST APIs and working in a microservices setup, including debugging problems that cross service boundaries.
- Good habits with Git, code review and automated testing.
Good to have:
- Hands-on time with AWS, GCP or Azure.
- Docker, Kubernetes and CI/CD pipelines.
- Message queues (Kafka, RabbitMQ) and caching layers like Redis.
- Experience with logging, metrics and tracing to understand what's happening in production.
- You've mentored someone, or sat on the interviewer side of a technical interview.
- Curiosity about AI and LLMs. Hands-on experience with LangChain, LangGraph or similar tools for building LLM-powered features is a bonus, but what matters more is that you're keen to learn them and put them to work on real product problems.
What we offer:
- Competitive compensation with equity or bonus incentives.
- Direct mentorship from senior tech leaders, and a clear path to Senior Engineer (SDE 3).
- Hybrid work flexibility.
- Comprehensive healthcare benefits.
- An annual learning allowance for courses, certifications and technical conferences.
Skills
Full Stack, Java, Python, MySQL, PostgreSQL, RESTful API, Microservices Architecture, MongoDB