Backend Software Engineer

Backend Software Engineer Java · Spring Boot · Distributed Systems ClearlyRated · USA (Remote, West Coast Only) · Engineering PLEASE NOTE: Applicants should be located in the Pacific Time Zone or be willing to relocate to this time zone at their own expense. PLEASE NOTE: Applicants must be authorized to work in the United States without requiring visa sponsorship. We are unable to support Student Visas as well. We're building the backend platform that powers survey automation and relationship intelligence for some of the world's largest professional services firms. If you love systems design, API design, and clean backend engineering, read on. About ClearlyRated ClearlyRated is a B2B SaaS platform that helps professional services firms, from global engineering consultancies to staffing agencies, measure, understand, and act on client satisfaction data. Our NPS-driven platform processes millions of survey interactions, powers real-time relationship health scoring, and is in the middle of a significant platform evolution toward event-driven survey automation and a modern, service-oriented backend built on Google Cloud. We're a small, focused engineering team building systems that operate at enterprise scale. That means the problems are real, the stakes are high, and every engineer on the team does work that matters., What You'll Build Real systems that enterprise clients depend on. Not greenfield experiments, but a world-class, brand-new platform with production code that has to be correct, observable, and resilient: * System, Database and API design as a first-class skill. You'll design service boundaries, data models, and REST API contracts (consumed by our frontend, enterprise integrations, and third-party clients) that have to last. Versioning, backward compatibility, idempotency, and clean error contracts are core to the job, not afterthoughts..

• Event-driven microservices on GCP Pub/Sub: async processing, backpressure handling, dead-letter queues, the full picture..
• Webhook-triggered survey automation engine. Business events in the client's system translate into survey sends through a reliable, auditable, event-driven workflow..
• Resilient, observable services: retries, timeouts, circuit breakers, structured logging, metrics, and tracing baked into how we build..
• Security and SSO integration for enterprise clients with complex credential and access models..
• Permission and access control systems that reflect matrix organizational hierarchies. The authorization layer is genuinely interesting here..
• An integration layer that connects enterprise data sources to our platform through well-designed service interfaces.., | | Our backend interview tests: systems design, API design, distributed system failure modes, Java fundamentals and JVM reasoning, and SQL. We give you real-world scenarios, not toy problems. Expect to discuss trade-offs, not just correct answers. .NET/C# candidates will be evaluated on transferable depth, not language syntax.

Java you understand at the JVM level. Concurrency, memory model, garbage collection, exception hierarchy - you can reason about what the runtime is doing, not just what your code says.

• Spring Boot / Spring ecosystem depth. Or deep understanding of dependency injection and IoC from another framework - we care that you understand the pattern, not just the annotations.

• SQL and data modelling confidence. You can write a query with joins, aggregations, and window functions. You think about indexes. You understand what an N+1 problem looks like in production.

• API design instincts. You know what makes an API contract good and what makes it a maintenance nightmare. You've thought about versioning, error semantics, and idempotency.

• Systems thinking under failure. You consider retries, timeouts, idempotency, and consistency before you consider happy paths.

• You've built something that handles real load. Even in a personal or academic context - something where correctness and reliability were actual constraints, not just nice-to-haves. Bonus Points

• .NET / C# experience is a genuine plus. We maintain services in both ecosystems. Engineers who can move across the Java-.NET boundary are valuable.

• GCP experience: Pub/Sub, Dataflow, BigQuery, Vertex AI

• Kafka or other message queue experience: consumer groups, offset management, partition strategy

• Kubernetes and container orchestration

• Event sourcing or CQRS patterns

• Experience with observability tooling - distributed tracing, structured logging, alerting on the things that matter

3.73.7 out of 5 stars West, TX Remote $90,000 a year - Full-time

ClearlyRated is the leading CX platform designed specifically for B2B service firms. We offer firms a sophisticated alternative to manual processes and basic survey tools, then pair that with world class customer care and support. Ours is an efficient, industry-focused solution that provides data-driven insights to quip service teams with a real-time understanding of client and internal employee interactions and satisfaction. Our platform anticipates and resolves service issues before they impact customers, boosting satisfaction and unlocking new opportunities. In addition, our CRM & ATS integrations allow our clients to fully automate the process, providing a hands-off, always-on view of the health of their customer and employee relationships. And our industry-specific CX benchmarking and online reputation tools offer tangible proof of a firm's commitment to high-quality service, to differentiate from the competition and strengthen client trust.