Backend Developer (Cloud Services)

About Nexcess

Nexcess provides specialty cloud solutions for organizations where performance and compliance have to coexist. We serve businesses worldwide, from agencies scaling client sites to enterprises running mission-critical operations. We've built our reputation on deep technical expertise and genuine partnership with every client we work with. Behind every environment we manage is a team of people who take the craft seriously and keep showing up when it matters.

Cloud Services delivers the data protection, security, and edge services - SSL, email, EADN, and CDN/WAF - that keep our customers’ applications safe and performant.

You will own features end to end: the specification, the code, the tests and how it behaves in production. This is an individual contributor role with no direct reports, and you are the engineer who answers for whether what you shipped actually works.

The pull request is the visible part. The job is the machine behind it: turning a loosely worded need into something precise enough to build against, naming what can break before it does, proving the change is correct rather than asserting it, and staying with it once it is live.

How we work

• Business alignment and focus come first. Engineering here exists to move the business, not to be busy. You will know which few things matter most this month and why, say so when the work in front of you is not one of them, and land what you committed to on dates the business can plan around, at a quality that does not come back as an incident or a customer escalation.
• Predictable, reliable delivery of quality software is the output of this job, and everything below is in service of it.
• This job gets more hands-on every quarter, not less. The volume of code goes up while the time you spend typing it goes down, so the value moves to the two ends of it: what you specify, and what you verify. You will stay close to production, run the AI harness daily, read code you did not write, and keep your technical judgment current rather than remembered.
• Whoever ships it owns it, regardless of what wrote it. Most code is AI-generated now, so the judgment moved to either side of it: specifying exactly what to build, and verifying that what came back is correct, secure and operable. An agent wrote it is not a defense. Your name is on the merge.
• You do not need to own the roadmap to know why the work matters. You will not be the Product counterpart at this level and you are not expected to be. You are expected to understand what the customer gets and what the business gains from the thing you are building, and to ask before you build the wrong thing correctly. The engineers who move fastest here are the ones who ask that question early rather than at the review.
• You go on call for what you build, and you take your turn on the rotation. Engineering declares risk and timelines in writing for the business to accept, and that includes yours: when a date is at risk you say so early, with evidence, rather than quietly.

Responsibilities

• Own features end to end inside your team's domain. Work that runs for weeks, touches several parts of the system and other people's code, and ends in a live, monitored change. This is the level where the work stops arriving pre-broken-down: you are the one who names the unknowns up front rather than discovering them late.
• Write the specification before the code. Most of the leverage sits upstream of the keyboard. Turn a request into something precise enough that an agent, or another engineer, builds the right thing the first time, and resolve ambiguity in writing with the person who asked.
• Run the AI harness every day. Use agentic tooling as the default way you work, automated review in the pull-request path, and reusable skills you build and share with the team rather than leave on your own laptop.
• Verify, and put the evidence on the pull request. Tests with every change, coverage gating on changed code, and failure cases exercised - not only the happy path. A reviewer should not have to take your word for it.
• Make your reviews worth having. With no authority, review is where much of your influence lands: catch the design problem while it is still cheap to fix, be specific about what to change and why, and be fast. Review latency slows the whole team down, and yours is part of it.
• Mentor engineers earlier on the ladder. Pair on the hard changes, explain the reasoning and not just the fix, and give feedback directly and early. You lead through design, code, and review, not through a reporting line.
• Own what you run, not only what you ship. Participate in on-call for your team's services, document incidents with actions closed on dates, remove toil rather than absorb it, and write down whatever only you know so no bus factor of one is left standing.
• Work in code you did not write. A hosting platform carries years of history. You will read your way into unfamiliar parts of it, change them safely without a rewrite you cannot justify, and leave each one better instrumented than you found it.
• Clear what you need from another team yourself. Find the dependency early, agree it directly with the engineer who owns it, and land it ahead of your work rather than escalating once it is late.

Requirements

• 5+ years of experience in software engineering, building and running production software, with real ownership of what you shipped after it shipped.
• 5+ years of experience with Perl or PHP.
• 5+ years of experience with relational databases.
• Depth in at least one part of a production system, and the ability to read your way into a part you have never seen. You can read a diff in a language you do not use daily and identify what is wrong with it.
• Hands-on AI-assisted engineering in your daily work rather than as a trial. You can specify precisely, review generated code critically, and explain where it fails and what you always check before it merges.
• Tests and evidence as a habit rather than a mandate. You write them as you go, gate on changed code, and have caught your own mistakes with them.
• Experience operating what you built. You have participated in a production on-call rotation, owned an incident, and contributed to a write-up that changed something afterwards.
• Clear written communication in a remote, distributed team. You record decisions and trade-offs in writing and work effectively with colleagues across several time zones.

Preferred

• 5+ years of experience with CDN, WAF, and server security
• Experience in managed hosting, cloud, or another high-availability service business.

We offer

• Visa support and relocation assistance.
• Daily lunches in the office.
• Work in a team of professionals at an international level.
• Comfortable working conditions.
• Opportunity to practice and improve your English.
• Competitive salary and all necessary equipment.
• Medical insurance.