Backend Engineer (Platform Team - Remote)

Job overview

We're looking for a Backend Engineer to join our Platform Engineering team. This role will be responsible for building, maintaining, and improving the backend services that support our client's core products, including video streaming, reporting, and user management services.

We are less concerned about previous experience and training than we are about raw cognitive ability, a solid work ethic and spirit of collaboration, excellent written and verbal communication skills, and ability to engage with, think about, and clearly articulate complex topics.

This role is a contract-to-hire and is fully remote (US). However, the candidate would be ideally based in Oregon.

About the company

Survant James works with startups and medium-sized businesses to create beautifully designed and robustly engineered web and mobile apps along with the server infrastructure on which those apps depend. Professional polyglots, delivering quality code for frontend and backend projects.

The client you will be working with provides video streaming systems and software to early childhood education, enrichment, and pet care centers. They are the leader in this space and their products are enjoyed by 1 million+ users in North America. Their latest software uses AI to turn classroom video into data that fuels a safer and smarter school.

About our engineering team

We act as an extension of our client's engineering department and are fully integrated in all aspects of strategic and day-to-day processes. For all intents and purposes, we are the same team and there is no agency/client distinction.

We take testing, validation, and automation extremely seriously. Sometimes we ship the wrong features, but we don't ship bugs. We utilize a Continuous Delivery release process and confidently deploy multiple times per day. In the rare case where something does go wrong, we build out guardrails to prevent it from ever happening again.

There are no big egos on this team. We pride ourselves on being multidisciplinary and pushing ourselves out of our comfort zones. While we do gravitate to certain roles or areas of the system, we actively work to prevent information siloing by rotating folks between frontend and backend tasks.

Responsibilities

Write well-thought-out implementation plans for all tasks and proactively seek out clarity on any requirements.

Approach coding with a test-first mindset (red, green, refactor).

Build robust, efficient, and secure API's, serving data to frontend services.

Design and manage necessary updates to our web service databases.

Collaborate with other engineers and stakeholders from product, customer support, etc. to better understand needs.

Evaluate requests/feedback from other teams based on feasibility and make recommendations, bearing in mind on-the-ground realities of the systems.

Provide and respond to code reviews.

Technical skills

Familiarity with

Command line tools: Unix, Bash, Git

Stack-specific languages/frameworks: mainly Java and SQL

REST API best practices

Testing frameworks and concepts

Nice to Have

Ability to automate tests, deploys, and other tasks using CI/CD

Prior projects utilizing docker containers

Experience or a desire to work with AWS and write infrastructure as code (IaC), using Terraform

Familiarity with HTTP Live Streaming (HLS), MPEG-DASH, MP4, and other streaming protocols

Soft skills

Comes to work in a spirit of collaboration

Gives and receives feedback in a courteous and professional manner

Takes ownership and responsibility for tasks while sharing and diffusing knowledge about different system areas across the team

Seeks answers independently, yet asks for help when stuck; explains coherently where answers have been already sought and what actions have already been tried

Applying

Please reply with resumé (with link to Github account) and cover letter.