For Employers

Surfe

Senior Backend Engineer

Posted 10 days ago
Europe
10+ years experience
Apply Now

Please mention DailyRemote when applying

?/100
Resume Match Score

Match your resume skills with our AI powered skill match!

Get professional review

Questions interviewers often ask for this role, with sample answers.

Create a cover letter for this job

Upload your resume and we draft a letter for this exact role, tailored to what it asks for.

  • Tailored to this role
  • Based on your resume
  • Fully editable
AI Summary

You will design, implement, and operate resilient distributed backend systems while ensuring high performance and reliability. Additionally, you will mentor team members, standardize observability patterns, and collaborate with product teams to define and measure success metrics.

Who You Are

We're looking for a Senior Backend Engineer who thrives in high-ownership environments and knows what it takes to build, ship, and operate distributed systems at scale, not just design them.

You’ll help build and scale a product that relies on reliable, high-throughput backend services
and strong operational maturity. This is a hands-on senior role: you will design, code, ship,
operate, and continuously improve distributed systems in production.

You're someone who has seen production fail, learned from it, and built better systems because of it. You care about observability, reliability, and code quality not as checkboxes but as craft. You're comfortable with ambiguity, collaborative by nature, and you raise the bar for the engineers around you.

What you’ll do

  • Design and implement distributed backend systems: services that are resilient,
    observable, and scalable (latency, throughput, reliability).

  • Build event-driven and asynchronous architectures using queues, pub/sub,
    background workers, and idempotent processing.

  • Own production reliability: performance tuning, incident response, on-call participation
    (if applicable), and systematic improvements (SLOs, error budgets, runbooks).

  • Raise the engineering bar: lead by example in code quality, API design, testing
    strategy, and operational best practices.

  • Deeply instrument services with logs, metrics, and traces; help standardize
    observability patterns across the platform.

  • Partner with Product and other engineers to define success metrics, measure impact,
    and iterate quickly based on real usage.

  • Mentor and guide: review designs and PRs, support other engineers, and shape
    long-term technical direction.

Specifically, we’re looking for

  • Senior experience (typically 8+ years) building and operating backend systems in
    production.

  • Strong coding skills in Go (production-grade, not scripting).

  • Distributed systems fundamentals: concurrency, backpressure, retries, idempotency,
    consistency tradeoffs, schema evolution, failure modes.

  • Cloud and infrastructure maturity (AWS preferred): designing services with managed
    cloud components, scaling patterns, cost awareness.

  • Kubernetes and Docker experience: containerized services, deployments, operational
    workflows.

  • Observability expertise: traces, metrics, logs, dashboards, alerting, incident analysis
    (Datadog and/or OpenTelemetry experience is a plus).

  • Databases: strong PostgreSQL skills (schema design, indexing, query tuning) plus
    comfort working with OpenSearch and modern data stores.

  • Engineering rigor: testing strategies (unit, integration, contract), CI/CD hygiene, safe
    rollout patterns (feature flags, canaries, gradual releases).

Bonus

  • Experience with queueing and streaming systems (SQS, SNS, Kafka, Kinesis,
    RabbitMQ, Pub/Sub).

  • Vector databases and retrieval patterns (pgvector, Pinecone, Weaviate, Milvus, Qdrant,
    OpenSearch vector).

  • Redis, MongoDB (only if truly used and not just “resume keywords”).

  • Terraform (or equivalent IaC), GitHub Actions (or similar CI/CD).

  • Security basics for backend systems (authn/authz, secrets management, least privilege,
    threat-aware design).

What success looks like

  • Services that are easier to operate: clear SLOs, better alerts, faster incident resolution.

  • Higher throughput and lower latency as usage grows.

  • Stronger platform foundations: repeatable patterns for async processing, observability,
    and safe deployments.

  • A team that levels up through your mentorship and technical leadership.

Ideally, you are someone that

  • Has previously worked in startups - comfortable navigating some uncertainty and high
    energy environments

  • Enjoys the collaborative process with different roles to design, implement and iterate on
    possible ideas and solutions

  • Is not a perfectionist but has a mindset of continuous, incremental improvements
    towards top-quality work

  • Is great at communicating with engineers, product managers, and other team members

  • Bonus:

    • Worked in the SalesTech space

Our Process

We want to be mindful of your time while finding the right candidate for our team. No homework to do, only human interactions ! Our typical recruitment timelines looks like this:

  • Screening call with Talent Acquisition (30 minutes) - to know more about you and go deeper about the role

  • Technical fit call with CTO (30 minutes) - to get to know each other, know about your technical depth.

  • Virtual Onsite Session :

    • Coding Session (1 hour) : In this hands-on session, you'll pair with our engineers to solve a real-world problem, focusing on clean logic, maintainability, and how you think through edge cases in real-time.

    • System Design Interview (1 hour) : We’ll dive into a whiteboard session to explore how you architect scalable systems, specifically looking at your ability to navigate technical trade-offs and balance performance with simplicity.

    • Culture and Values Interview (30 minutes) : We’ll wrap up by exploring our core values and your working style to ensure our environment is one where you’ll feel energized, supported, and empowered to do your best work.

    • Manager Interview (30 minutes) : This is a two-way conversation with your potential lead to discuss your career trajectory, how you navigate project ownership, and how we can support your growth within the team.

If all goes well, we’ll then make you an offer !

What we offer

  • Up to 100K€ package, depending on equity, profile and contract type

  • Challenging and interesting work

  • A place in our diverse team

  • A healthy work environment (few meetings and “low touch” management)

  • Fully-remote work within EU timezones (GMT +/- 3h)

  • Stipend to set up your home office

  • Yearly team events in Paris and offsite

  • Health insurance and other benefits applicable to your place of residence, if contract of employment in France or elsewhere via Deel Employer of record

  • Possibility to work as a freelancer

Automatically Apply to the Best Remote Jobs

Stop the endless job search. Our AI finds and applies to the best jobs for you.

Try it Now
Keep looking

Similar Jobs

See all Remote Software Development jobs →

Sales Support & Account Operations Specialist (Arabic, French and English)

Full Time Morocco Software Development

Applied Mechanical Engineer / Mechanical Design Engineer (3991)

Full Time United States Software Development

Live Commerce Administrator

Full Time El Salvador Software Development

Outsystems Developer ( Intermediate / Senior )

Full Time Brazil Software Development

Senior Data Scientist (Look-2-Book)

Full Time Portugal Software Development

Deployment Strategist

Full Time Spain Software Development
Apply Now

Personalize your Remote Job Search in 3 Easy Steps!

Featuring 215,876+ Jobs in Backend Engineer

Answer easy questions

Answer easy questions

215,876+ jobs across 15+ categories

Get your best job matches

Get your best job matches

Only hand-screened, legit jobs

Find a remote job faster

Find a remote job faster

No ads, scams, or junk

I was the first applicant for a remote marketing position that got listed on the company website the same day I applied. Had an interview within 48 hours!”

Sarah J. — Sarah J. · Marketing Manager ★★★★★ Verified