Backend Developer (Experience 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.

Experience Services builds and maintains the cart, checkout, order, billing, and authentication systems that power every customer transaction across Managed Hosting and Managed Applications.

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 backend features end to end within the Experience Services domain. Take work from specification through implementation, testing, deployment, monitoring, and ongoing production support across cart, checkout, order, billing, and authentication systems.
• Design and develop reliable backend services and integrations. Build and maintain application logic, APIs, workflows, and supporting services that power customer transactions across Managed Hosting and Managed Applications.
• Build and maintain billing and invoicing functionality. Develop reliable transaction flows, billing logic, invoice generation, and integrations with related systems.
• Work with relational databases and data models. Design, query, and maintain database-backed functionality with a focus on correctness, performance, and reliability.
• Translate business and product requirements into clear technical specifications. Identify dependencies, failure scenarios, edge cases, and unknowns early and resolve ambiguity before implementation begins.
• Use AI-assisted engineering tools as part of your daily workflow. Apply agentic tooling to implementation and review while critically validating generated code and remaining accountable for the final result.
• Verify changes with evidence. Write tests with every change, validate failure scenarios as well as the happy path, and provide clear evidence that changes are ready for production.
• Review code and technical changes from other engineers. Identify design, maintainability, security, and reliability risks early and provide clear, actionable feedback.
• Work safely in existing and unfamiliar codebases. Understand legacy or complex systems, make incremental improvements without unnecessary rewrites, and leave code better tested and documented than you found it.
• Own what you run. Participate in on-call rotation, respond to incidents, contribute to root-cause analysis, and ensure follow-up actions are completed.
• Mentor other engineers. Share technical knowledge, explain design decisions, and support less experienced engineers through implementation and review.
• Coordinate dependencies across teams. Identify cross-team needs early and work directly with relevant engineers to avoid delivery blockers.

Required

• 5+ years of experience in backend software engineering and production systems.
• 5+ years of experience with Perl or PHP.
• 5+ years of experience with relational databases such as PostgreSQL or MariaDB.
• 5+ years of experience with billing and invoicing systems.
• Strong understanding of backend architecture, application logic, APIs, and data-driven systems.
• Experience building and supporting transaction-heavy systems such as cart, checkout, ordering, billing, or authentication platforms.
• Strong SQL skills and experience working with relational data models.
• Experience writing automated tests and validating production changes before deployment.
• Ability to read and understand unfamiliar code and troubleshoot issues across multiple parts of a production system.
• Experience participating in an on-call rotation and responding to production incidents.
• Hands-on experience with AI-assisted engineering tools as part of day-to-day development work.
• Clear written communication skills and the ability to work effectively in a remote, distributed team across multiple time zones.

Preferred

• Experience with payment, billing, invoicing, or financial system integrations.
• Experience with authentication or identity-related systems.
• Experience with complex customer transaction and order lifecycle workflows.
• Experience in managed hosting, cloud platforms, SaaS, or another high-availability service environment.
• Experience working with complex or legacy backend systems.
• Experience mentoring engineers and reviewing backend design and code.