Backend Engineer

We're looking for a senior Backend API Engineer with 8+ years of experience building and scaling production APIs, including at least 4 years working hands-on with FastAPI. You will design, build, and maintain high-performance, secure backend services, and act as a technical leader on architecture and system design decisions. Experience Requirements • 8+ years of overall experience building and operating backend APIs in production environments • Minimum 4 years of hands-on experience with FastAPI specifically (not just general Python API frameworks) • Demonstrated experience owning services end-to-end — design, development, deployment, and monitoring • Prior experience mentoring engineers or leading technical design discussions is a plus Required Skills (Mandatory) • FastAPI 4+ years of deep, hands-on production experience — routing, dependency injection, async endpoints, middleware, background tasks • Pydantic Strong command of data validation, serialization, custom validators, and schema design (v1/v2) • Redis Caching strategies, pub/sub, session/token storage, expiry and eviction policies Core Skills (Working Knowledge Expected) • System Design — ability to architect scalable, fault-tolerant, high-throughput backend systems • Authentication & Authorization — OAuth2, RBAC, secure API access patterns • JWT — token issuance, validation, refresh flows, and security best practices • HTTPX — async HTTP client usage for reliable service-to-service communication • API Design — RESTful principles, versioning, rate limiting, backward compatibility • Message Queues — experience with Kafka, RabbitMQ, SQS, or Celery for async processing • L1 Cache Handling — in-memory/application-level caching alongside Redis (L2) for low-latency reads • Exception Handling (RFC 9457) — standardized "Problem Details for HTTP APIs" error responses • SQL — strong working knowledge of relational databases (PostgreSQL/MySQL), query optimization, and ORM usage (SQLAlchemy) Responsibilities • Design and develop high-performance RESTful APIs using FastAPI with clean, validated schemas via Pydantic • Architect scalable backend systems, making sound trade-offs on performance, reliability, and maintainability • Implement multi-layer caching (Redis + in-memory L1 cache) to optimize latency and throughput • Build secure authentication/authorization flows using JWT and OAuth2 • Integrate with external and internal services using async HTTP clients (HTTPX) • Design and consume message queues for asynchronous and event-driven processing • Implement standardized, consistent error handling following RFC 9457 • Write efficient, optimized SQL queries and review database interaction patterns • Drive system design discussions and review architecture proposals across teams • Write unit/integration tests and uphold high code quality and observability standards Nice to Have • Experience with Docker, Kubernetes, and CI/CD pipelines • Familiarity with observability tools (logging, tracing, metrics) • Exposure to microservices architecture at scale