Senior Backend Engineer (Remote, US)

📋 Description

• • Join Openly as a Senior Backend Engineer and become the architect of a next-generation insurance platform that is redefining how homeowners and small-business owners protect what matters most. You will own critical services that price risk in real time, orchestrate policy lifecycles from quote to renewal, and scale to tens of thousands of concurrent API requests across all 50 states.
• • Design, build, and evolve event-driven microservices in Python (FastAPI) and Go that power everything from actuarial rating engines to claims triage workflows. Your code will sit at the intersection of data science, regulatory compliance, and customer experience, translating complex actuarial models into deterministic, low-latency endpoints that agents and consumers trust.
• • Champion reliability and performance by instrumenting every service with distributed tracing, custom metrics, and chaos testing. You will set SLOs that keep our p99 latency under 250 ms for rating calls, lead blameless post-mortems, and automate runbooks so the on-call rotation is a learning opportunity—not a sleepless marathon.
• • Collaborate daily with product managers, actuaries, and front-end engineers in short, focused sprints. You will translate regulatory changes in states like Florida or California into deployable features within days, not months, while mentoring mid-level engineers through thoughtful PR reviews and pair-programming sessions.
• • Own the data layer that ingests terabytes of geospatial, weather, and property intelligence. You will optimize PostgreSQL and DynamoDB schemas, tune Redshift queries for actuarial analysts, and introduce new streaming pipelines (Kafka, Kinesis) that turn external hazard feeds into actionable underwriting insights.
• • Drive cloud cost efficiency without sacrificing resilience. You will right-size Kubernetes clusters, adopt Graviton instances where it makes sense, and implement feature flags that let us ship dark-launches to 5% of traffic before a full rollout.
• • Shape our security posture by embedding OAuth 2.0 / OIDC best practices, rotating secrets via AWS Secrets Manager, and partnering with our security team on threat-modeling sessions. Your pull requests will be the gold standard for secure, idiomatic Python and Go.
• • Contribute to the engineering culture through weekly tech talks, internal RFCs, and open-source contributions. Whether it’s releasing a FastAPI extension for structured logging or presenting at PyCon, you will amplify Openly’s reputation as a destination for world-class backend talent.
• • Influence technical strategy at the executive level. You will present quarterly architecture reviews to the CTO, propose multi-year platform roadmaps, and quantify ROI on engineering investments so leadership can make data-driven decisions.
• • Enjoy true remote-first flexibility—work from your home office in Austin, a cabin in Tahoe, or a co-working space in Lisbon. We care about outcomes, not timecards, and give you the autonomy to structure your day around deep focus blocks and family commitments alike.