Backend Engineer

Our Story

At The Alter Office, we build what comes next. We operate as an internal innovation lab, creating stealth products, new business bets, and high-leverage systems designed to unlock disproportionate value for us and our partner company ITW Consulting.

Our work is not centered around being a conventional service partner. Instead, we focus on building products and platforms that solve complex, strategic problems and create long-term advantage. Where needed, we have stepped in on critical opportunities beyond the usual scope, especially when speed, product thinking, and execution depth mattered most.

About the Role

We are building a holistic AdTech platform that delivers premium value to both advertisers and publishers, and the backend is where that entire ecosystem actually runs - the ad marketplace, campaign creation, ad-serving decisioning, analytics collection, attribution, and ROAS measurement.

Concretely, that means large-scale architecture: the ad-serving systems that make real-time decisioning calls at volume, the scalable data platforms that ingest and process billions of events a day, the analytics platforms that turn that data into attribution and ROAS numbers advertisers and publishers trust, and the autonomous AI agents we're building to automate campaign optimization and decisioning across the platform.

We are looking for someone who is eager to learn, enjoys solving technical problems, and wants to grow beyond simply implementing tasks. You'll have opportunities to understand how backend systems connect to the product and gradually take ownership of larger parts of the platform.

Key Responsibilities

• Build and maintain backend APIs and services for our ad marketplace, campaign management, and analytics platforms.
• Work with senior engineers to design and implement scalable backend solutions.
• Develop RESTful APIs and asynchronous backend workflows.
• Work with SQL databases such as MySQL and PostgreSQL and NoSQL technologies such as MongoDB and Redis.
• Implement data models, database queries, caching, and basic performance optimizations.
• Contribute to backend infrastructure supporting analytics, attribution, and AI-powered platform features.
• Collaborate with product, frontend, backend, and DevOps teams to deliver end-to-end features.
• Implement authentication, authorization, and basic security practices under the guidance of senior engineers.
• Write clean, maintainable, documented, and tested code.
• Use Git and participate in code reviews and team development practices.
• Learn and contribute to deploying backend services on cloud platforms such as AWS, GCP, or Azure.
• Work with Docker for containerizing backend services.
• Contribute to CI/CD pipelines and development workflows.
• Help monitor, debug, and troubleshoot backend services in development and production environments.
• Explore event-driven and distributed architectures using technologies such as message brokers, WebSockets, or GraphQL where appropriate.

Requirements

• 1–2 years of professional backend engineering experience, including relevant internship or project experience.
• Proficiency in at least one backend language, with the ability and willingness to adapt to other languages such as Node.js/JavaScript, Go, Python, and Java.
• Good understanding of RESTful API design and backend fundamentals.
• Good understanding of asynchronous programming and how backend services communicate.
• Familiarity with relational databases such as MySQL or PostgreSQL.
• Familiarity with at least one NoSQL database such as MongoDB or Redis is a plus.
• Good understanding of data modeling and writing SQL queries.
• Familiarity with Git and software development workflows.
• Good understanding of Docker and containerized applications.
• Exposure to cloud platforms such as AWS, GCP, or Azure is a plus.
• Understanding of basic backend security concepts such as authentication, authorization, and secure API practices.
• Strong problem-solving and debugging skills.
• Good communication and willingness to collaborate with other engineers and product teams.
• Strong learning mindset and willingness to work with unfamiliar technologies.
• Comfortable working in a fast-paced environment with evolving priorities.

5 steps, and we tell you where you stand at each one.

Online Assessment : Evaluate coding skills, backend fundamentals, SQL, problem-solving, and technical understanding.

Technical Interview 1 : Discuss previous projects, backend experience, APIs, databases, system design, and production experience.

Take-Home Assessment : A practical backend assignment to evaluate code quality, architecture, scalability, testing, and ability to build a production-ready solution.

Technical Interview 2 : Deep dive into the take-home assignment, system design, technical decisions, scalability, debugging, cloud, and architecture.

HR Interview : Discuss communication, ownership, culture fit, career goals, compensation, availability, and overall expectations.

Skills

Architecture, WebSocket, Authentication, Redis, RESTful APIs, cicd, Debugging, Ruby, Amazon Web Services (AWS), SQL, GraphQL, grafana, Docker, Python, Java, Kubernetes, prometheus, NOSQL Databases, Microsoft Windows Azure, RabbitMQ, PostgreSQL, Microservices, MySQL, Authorization, Data security, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), MongoDB