Senior Backend Engineer

Description

Why Gravitate?

At Gravitate, we’re on a mission to put everyday supply and logistics decisions in motion, powered by innovative problem-solving from industry experts.

A lot of companies say it. We mean it: Gravitate is different. Rooted in the spirit of collaboration, we thrive on the smarts of our people and the dynamic we’ve cultivated.

Tell Me About My Job:

If you are considering this role, you are someone who has stopped waiting to be handed well-defined work. You take a large, ambiguous problem, break it into a plan, and drive it to production — unblocking yourself and the people around you along the way.

You’ll own a significant area of Gravitate’s fuel logistics platform — or a full service — and be accountable for its reliability, performance, and evolution over time. That means leading design for complex features, evaluating real trade-offs between performance, maintainability, and cost, and documenting the decisions so the next engineer understands them.

You’ll go deep on the backend: Python services and APIs, data modeling in MongoDB, async and event-driven processing, running on Kubernetes in GCP and Azure. You’ll also be one of the people we count on when something breaks in production — finding root cause quickly, driving recovery, and then driving the monitoring, observability, and performance improvements that keep it from happening again.

Seniority here isn’t just scope of code — it’s scope of influence. You’ll mentor our mid-level engineers, raise the bar in code and design review, and lead technical initiatives without needing formal authority to do it.

We’re strongly against artificial separations of responsibility and throwing work “over the wall.” As a senior engineer here, you’re part of the product team — in the room for the product conversation, not downstream of it.

You’re an Ideal Candidate If:

• You deliver large things, accurately. You take a big feature with real unknowns, break it into a plan, estimate it honestly, and land it. When it slips, you raise the risk early instead of hoping.
• You design before you build. You can hold performance, maintainability, and cost in your head at the same time, pick a direction, and explain why. You design for the change that’s coming, not just the ticket in front of you.
• You own your work in production. You’re the person who gets to root cause fast on a hard issue, and who cares about the dashboards, alerts, and query plans in your area — not just the feature that shipped.
• You make the engineers around you better. Your code review comments teach something. Mid-level engineers seek you out. You lead initiatives because people follow you, not because you were assigned.
• You have strong opinions and hold them honestly. You argue for the best solution, not necessarily your own, and you can explain a complex technical trade-off to someone who doesn’t write code.
• You know the business, not just the codebase. You understand your product area deeply enough to push back on a product decision — and to make a better one.
• You want to work in an AI-enabled workflow. You see the impact of AI on code generation and are willing and able to see how it can make you more productive. You want to help in building the harness around it so that the team can get more done.

Duties/Responsibilities:

• Drive delivery of large backend features end-to-end — breaking large projects into manageable plans, estimating work with moderate unknowns accurately, and raising risks early
• Lead technical design for complex features; evaluate trade-offs across performance, maintainability, and cost; document decisions; design for extensibility
• Own a significant area of the product or a full service — accountable for its reliability, performance, and evolution
• Build and operate Python services, APIs, and data models (MongoDB) deployed on Kubernetes across GCP and Azure
• Debug and resolve medium-to-large production issues; quickly identify root cause and drive fast response and recovery
• Drive monitoring, observability, and performance health in your product area
• Review code and technical designs with constructive, specific feedback; mentor junior and mid-level engineers, including on how to produce higher-quality designs
• Partner with product on medium-to-large features — contributing real feedback and helping shape product decisions in your domain
• Write clear technical documents; communicate complex technical topics to non-technical stakeholders and facilitate productive technical discussions
• Proactively unblock yourself and others; make pragmatic trade-offs between speed and quality
• Help shape team culture and engineering practices in your area of expertise.

Required Qualifications:

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience building and operating production backend systems
• Deep expertise in multiple areas of a backend stack: a primary server-side language (Python preferred), API design, data modeling, and automated testing
• Demonstrated track record of delivering large features end-to-end, on plans you built yourself, with moderate unknowns
• Experience owning a service or major product area in production — including its reliability and performance, not just its features
• Strong debugging and troubleshooting skills on medium-to-large issues; comfortable participating in on-call for what you own
• Working knowledge of infrastructure, security, and observability, plus CI/CD and deployment practices
• Experience mentoring junior and mid-level engineers and giving high-quality code review feedback
• Strong written and verbal communication — able to produce clear medium-to-large technical documents and explain trade-offs to non-technical stakeholders
• Openness to utilizing and becoming an expert in AI-assisted development to supercharge your ability to get stuff done.

Nice to Have Experience:

• Hands-on experience with our stack: Python, MongoDB, Kubernetes, GCP or Azure
• Comfort reaching into React/TypeScript when a feature needs it end-to-end
• Backend engineering experience in a B2B SaaS or enterprise software environment
• Background in a logistics, supply chain, or energy/fuel domain
• Performance and scale work against large data volumes — query optimization, caching, and profiling
• AI engineering experience – working with production agentic systems and ML / operations models.

About the Gravitate Team:

To understand who our people are, you should first understand what they’re not: replaceable. Each member of the team is chosen carefully and with intention. We believe that finding the right fit is more important than a laundry list of credentials – and that people are people first, and titles second.

Because we hire the Gravitate way, our team is certainly one of a kind. We’ve brought together incredible talent that regularly collaborates to create clean, fresh solutions. That effort has led to remarkable opportunities, including work with many Fortune 500 clients. We’ve found that the winning combination of exciting achievements, trust in one another and open communication lays the groundwork for long-lasting, successful careers. That, and the fact that we clap for each other at every opportunity.

Problem solvers, go-getters and charge-takers — we (really) want to hear from you.