Senior Backend Software Engineer

📋 Description

• • Own the architecture and evolution of RippleMatch’s core backend services that power intelligent matching between thousands of early-career candidates and hundreds of Fortune-1000 employers. You will design, build, and scale distributed systems that process résumés, assessments, and behavioral data in real time, turning complex heuristics into sub-second recommendations.
• • Lead green-field projects from whiteboard to production. Recent examples include a machine-learning pipeline that predicts candidate fit with 92 % accuracy and a new event-driven platform that reduced time-to-hire by 40 %. You will choose the right languages, frameworks, and cloud primitives (we use Python, Go, Postgres, Redis, Kubernetes, and AWS) and set the technical bar for the rest of the backend org.
• • Champion reliability and performance. Our traffic spikes during campus recruiting season; you will implement circuit breakers, autoscaling policies, and chaos-engineering tests so that every student can submit an application at 11:59 p.m. the night before a deadline without a hiccup. You will also define SLIs/SLOs and own on-call rotations that keep our p99 latency under 200 ms.
• • Collaborate cross-functionally with product managers, data scientists, and front-end engineers to translate ambiguous user pain points into elegant APIs. You will run design reviews, write detailed RFCs, and give thoughtful code reviews that level up junior teammates.
• • Mentor and grow the team. RippleMatch has doubled in size year-over-year; you will interview candidates, onboard new hires, and run weekly learning sessions on topics like advanced SQL indexing, event sourcing, or domain-driven design.
• • Drive data privacy and security best practices. Handling résumés for students across the globe means complying with FERPA, GDPR, and SOC 2. You will implement encryption at rest, fine-grained IAM policies, and automated vulnerability scanning to keep candidate trust at the center of everything we build.
• • Contribute to open source and the broader engineering community. We sponsor PyCon, maintain several OSS libraries, and encourage every engineer to publish talks or blog posts. Your work will help shape how the industry thinks about fair, scalable hiring tech.
• • Measure impact obsessively. Every feature you ship will be instrumented with product analytics so we can see within days—not quarters—whether we are actually reducing inequality in early-career recruiting. You will iterate quickly, run A/B tests, and celebrate wins with GIFs in Slack.