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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Back Server

💰 $80,000 - $160,000

EngineeringSoftware DevelopmentBackendCloud

🎯 Role Definition

The Back Server (Backend Server Engineer) is responsible for building and maintaining the server-side components that power web and mobile applications. This includes designing APIs, implementing business logic, optimizing database access, ensuring system reliability and security, and collaborating with product, frontend and DevOps teams to deliver production-grade services. The role emphasizes scalable architectures, fault-tolerant microservices, automated delivery pipelines, and measurable performance metrics.

This job is ideal for engineers who specialize in backend services, API design, distributed systems, and cloud-native operations.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Junior Backend Engineer
  • Software Engineer (Generalist)
  • SRE / DevOps Engineer transitioning to application backend

Advancement To:

  • Senior Backend Engineer / Staff Backend Engineer
  • Tech Lead / Engineering Manager (Backend)
  • Principal Engineer / Architect (Platform or Distributed Systems)

Lateral Moves:

  • Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)
  • Platform Engineer
  • API Product or Data Engineering roles

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Architect, design, implement, and maintain robust, scalable backend services and microservices using languages such as Java, Kotlin, Go, Python, Node.js, or C#; ensure code quality through clean design patterns, unit and integration testing, and peer code reviews.
  • Design and maintain RESTful and/or GraphQL APIs with clear versioning, documentation (OpenAPI/Swagger), and backward compatibility strategies to support mobile and web clients.
  • Build and operate distributed systems that meet availability, latency, throughput, and cost targets; identify and mitigate single points of failure and cascading failures across services.
  • Implement and optimize data models and queries for OLTP and analytical workloads using relational databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL) and NoSQL stores (MongoDB, Cassandra, Redis); tune schema, indexes, and queries for performance and scalability.
  • Design service-to-service communication patterns (HTTP/gRPC/messaging) and implement resilient retry, backoff, circuit breaking and rate-limiting strategies to maintain system stability under load.
  • Lead capacity planning, performance testing and scalability exercises (load testing, benchmarking); identify bottlenecks and deliver improvements that reduce latency and increase throughput.
  • Own the CI/CD pipelines for backend services, automating build, test, security scanning, artifact management, and deployment to environments (staging, canary, production) with tools like Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, or CircleCI.
  • Deploy and manage backend workloads on cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure) using infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, CloudFormation, Pulumi) and container orchestration (Kubernetes, ECS); architect for cost-efficiency and resilience.
  • Implement observability across services: structured logging, distributed tracing (OpenTelemetry, Jaeger), and metrics (Prometheus, Grafana) to enable rapid triage and SLA monitoring.
  • Troubleshoot, debug and resolve production incidents, perform root cause analysis (RCA), and drive postmortems with actionable remediation and prevention plans.
  • Harden backend services for security: authentication & authorization (OAuth2, JWT), input validation, encryption in transit and at rest, secrets management, vulnerability scanning and dependency management.
  • Design and implement data migration strategies and zero-downtime deployment techniques, including feature toggles and schema evolution best practices.
  • Collaborate with product managers, frontend engineers and stakeholders to translate business requirements into technical specifications and prioritized deliverables.
  • Mentor junior engineers, provide constructive code reviews, and promote best practices for system design, testing, and documentation across the team.
  • Maintain and evolve service SLAs and SLOs; create and maintain runbooks and operational playbooks for on-call responders and triage workflows.
  • Integrate backend systems with third-party APIs and external partners, managing authentication, rate limits, and robust error handling to maintain reliability.
  • Implement caching strategies (CDN, reverse proxies, in-memory caches like Redis) to reduce latency and backend load while ensuring cache invalidation and coherence.
  • Drive data consistency and transactional integrity across distributed systems using patterns such as sagas, distributed transactions or event sourcing where appropriate.
  • Support metrics-driven decision making by instrumenting code to collect user behavior, performance and business metrics; collaborate with analytics teams to enable data-driven features.
  • Lead technical discovery, spike investigations and proof-of-concepts for new backend technologies, frameworks or architectural patterns relevant to product goals.
  • Ensure compliance and regulatory requirements are met for backend systems (GDPR, SOC2, PCI-DSS) by collaborating with security and compliance teams on audits, controls and documentation.
  • Participate actively in agile rituals (sprint planning, demos, retrospectives) and own delivery commitments while helping refine the team’s backlog and technical roadmap.

Secondary Functions

  • Support ad-hoc data requests and exploratory data analysis.
  • Contribute to the organization's data strategy and roadmap.
  • Collaborate with business units to translate data needs into engineering requirements.
  • Participate in sprint planning and agile ceremonies within the data engineering team.
  • Produce and maintain technical documentation, runbooks, API reference docs and developer onboarding materials.
  • Evaluate and recommend open-source libraries, vendor solutions or managed services that accelerate delivery without compromising reliability.
  • Participate in hiring: interview backend candidates, evaluate technical fit, and help grow the engineering organization.
  • Conduct regular architecture reviews and contribute to team-level tech debt repayment plans.
  • Advocate for accessibility, localization and performance budgets in backend design decisions.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Strong proficiency in at least one backend language: Java/Kotlin, Go, Python, Node.js (TypeScript), or C#; ability to design idiomatic, testable and maintainable server code.
  • Deep understanding of RESTful API design, GraphQL and API versioning patterns; experience with OpenAPI/Swagger and API gateway patterns.
  • Experience with microservices architecture, event-driven systems and service meshes; familiarity with gRPC, Kafka, RabbitMQ or other messaging platforms.
  • Proficiency with relational databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL) and NoSQL stores (MongoDB, Redis, Cassandra); schema design, indexing and performance tuning experience.
  • Strong experience with cloud-native deployments on AWS/GCP/Azure; familiarity with managed services (RDS, DynamoDB, Cloud SQL) and serverless patterns (Lambda/Cloud Functions).
  • Containerization and orchestration skills: Docker, Kubernetes (K8s), Helm; knowledge of deployment strategies (blue/green, canary).
  • Infrastructure-as-code experience with Terraform, CloudFormation or Pulumi; ability to version and test infrastructure changes.
  • CI/CD and automation expertise: building pipelines, automated testing (unit, integration, contract tests), artifact repositories and release workflows.
  • Observability and monitoring: structured logging (ELK/EFK), distributed tracing (OpenTelemetry/Jaeger), metrics and alerting (Prometheus/Grafana).
  • Performance engineering and load testing tools experience (JMeter, Gatling, Locust); ability to diagnose latency, memory and CPU issues.
  • Security best practices: OAuth2/OpenID Connect, JWT, TLS, secure secrets management (Vault/Secrets Manager), OWASP awareness and dependency scanning.
  • Familiarity with caching strategies (Redis, Memcached), CDN integrations and cache invalidation patterns.
  • Experience with data migration, schema evolution, and safe rollout patterns for database changes.
  • Knowledge of design patterns for distributed systems (circuit breaker, bulkhead, leader election, sagas, idempotency).
  • Experience with feature flags and runtime configuration for gradual rollouts and experimentation.

Soft Skills

  • Strong problem-solving skills with a pragmatic, outcomes-oriented approach to engineering trade-offs.
  • Excellent communication: able to explain complex technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders and write clear, actionable documentation.
  • Collaboration and teamwork: experience working cross-functionally with product, design, QA and operations teams.
  • Ownership and accountability: takes responsibility for services in production, including on-call rotations and incident response.
  • Mentorship: coaches and develops junior engineers and fosters a culture of continuous learning.
  • Prioritization and time management: balances delivery speed with code quality and technical debt reduction.
  • Customer focus: prioritizes reliability and user impact in design and implementation decisions.
  • Adaptability: comfortable learning new technologies and evolving architectures in a fast-paced environment.
  • Analytical mindset: uses metrics and data to guide decisions and measure the impact of changes.
  • Conflict resolution: navigates trade-offs and technical disagreements constructively to reach consensus.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems, or related technical field; or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred Education:

  • Master's degree in Computer Science, Distributed Systems, or related discipline or relevant professional certifications (AWS Certified, GCP Professional Cloud Architect, Kubernetes Certified).

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science
  • Software Engineering
  • Distributed Systems
  • Information Technology
  • Data Science / Applied Mathematics (for data-oriented backend roles)

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 3 - 10+ years backend engineering or server-side development experience depending on seniority.

Preferred:

  • 5+ years building production backend services at scale.
  • Demonstrable experience shipping microservices, scaling systems to millions of users, and owning services in production.
  • Familiarity with cloud-native ecosystems, observability tooling, and modern CI/CD practices.
  • Strong portfolio of system design decisions, performance improvements, or open-source contributions (optional but valued).
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