Senior Backend Engineer (Contractor)

📋 Description

• • As a Senior Backend Engineer (Contractor) at Hauler Hero, you will be instrumental in shaping the future of our core backend services. This is a pivotal, 100% hands-on role where you will be responsible for the end-to-end design, development, and evolution of the systems that form the backbone of our platform. Hauler Hero serves waste hauling companies across North America, and your contributions will directly impact their daily operations, efficiency, and success.
• • You will dive deep into building scalable, reliable, and maintainable backend systems, ensuring they can handle significant growth and complex workloads. This involves not just writing code, but also architecting solutions that are robust and future-proof. Your work will be critical in enhancing system robustness, continuously refactoring existing services to meet evolving demands, and shipping new features that drive business value.
• • This role demands strong technical judgment, a proactive approach to problem-solving, and the ability to navigate ambiguity with confidence. Clear and effective communication is paramount, especially within our remote, distributed team environment. You will collaborate closely with Product Managers to understand requirements, Frontend Engineers to ensure seamless integration, and Platform Engineers to maintain and enhance our infrastructure.
• • Hauler Hero is pioneering an AI-First approach to engineering. AI tools are not an afterthought but an integral part of our daily workflow. You will leverage cutting-edge AI assistants like Claude, Claude Code, Cursor, and GitHub Copilot to accelerate development across various tasks. This includes AI-assisted implementation of Spring Boot services, APIs, database migrations, and intricate business logic.
• • Your responsibilities will extend to AI-assisted test generation, receiving and acting upon refactoring suggestions, and utilizing AI for enhanced code review support. Furthermore, you'll employ AI for efficient log analysis, debugging complex issues, and proactive problem investigation. It is crucial to understand that while AI accelerates the process, you remain fully accountable for reviewing, validating, and owning every piece of code and solution generated. Speed is important, but correctness, performance, and long-term maintainability are paramount. This role is ideally suited for engineers who embrace AI-assisted development and possess the technical acumen to critically evaluate and integrate AI-generated output.
• • Core Backend Development: You will design, build, and maintain robust backend service layers, writing clean, testable, and high-performance code primarily in Java and/or Kotlin using the Spring Boot framework. A significant part of your role will involve designing and implementing APIs that are architected to scale effectively with real-world production workloads, ensuring they remain performant and reliable as our user base and data volume grow.
• • You will also be responsible for refactoring and extending existing services to enhance their reliability, scalability, and maintainability. This includes identifying technical debt and proactively addressing it. Furthermore, you will contribute to the development of reusable components and design patterns that significantly improve team velocity and code consistency across the platform.
• • Data & Performance Optimization: A key aspect of this role involves designing and optimizing relational schemas within PostgreSQL. You will write and tune performant SQL queries to handle large volumes of data efficiently. A critical responsibility is validating that database access patterns scale effectively under increasing load, preventing performance degradation. You will be expected to identify and resolve performance bottlenecks across various services, ensuring the platform operates at peak efficiency.
• • Collaboration & Delivery: You will operate as an integral part of a cross-functional Agile Scrum team, actively participating in all team ceremonies. This includes engaging in design reviews, thorough code reviews, and contributing to architectural discussions. You will collaborate closely with frontend and product teams to ensure the successful development and delivery of new features, aligning technical solutions with product vision.
• • A significant responsibility will be debugging and resolving production issues promptly and effectively, minimizing downtime and impact on users. You will also play a key role in contributing to the continuous improvement of our engineering processes and practices, sharing insights and advocating for best practices.
• • Mentorship & Culture: As a senior engineer, you are expected to mentor and guide other engineers through constructive code reviews and technical discussions. You will contribute to fostering a culture of continuous learning, rapid iteration, and constructive feedback. Proactive sharing of context and knowledge is essential to prevent knowledge silos and ensure team alignment.
• • Your success will be measured by the reliability, scalability, and maintainability of the backend services you develop. Consistent and timely feature delivery with minimal rework, rapid diagnosis and resolution of production issues, and ensuring that database and API performance scales seamlessly with usage will be key indicators. Building strong trust with the frontend, product, and platform teams through your technical expertise and collaborative approach is also a critical measure of success.