Golang Developer

· Own and evolve the backend architecture for a brand-new, Go-based microservices platform, setting technical direction that other engineers and teams build on, and ensuring it holds up against a multi-year roadmap, not just the next release.

· Define service boundaries, domain models, and integration patterns - synchronous APIs and asynchronous, event-driven messaging - so teams can build, deploy, and scale independently without drifting into a distributed monolith.

· Partner with Product, Front End, Design, and QA leadership to shape “the right things the right way” at a strategic level - influencing what gets built before it reaches the requirements stage.

· Set the standard for performance, scalability, reliability, and security across the platform, and build the shared Go libraries, service templates, and guardrails that make it easy for other engineers to meet that bar by default.

· Define and drive adoption of documentation, idiomatic Go coding standards, architecture decision records, and architectural best practices across the backend org, not just within one team.

· Own the API and event contracts that the front end and other systems depend on - setting and enforcing standards for API design, versioning, schema management, error handling, and idempotency, in close partnership with front-end leadership.

· Define the data strategy for the platform: data ownership per service, schema design, migrations, consistency patterns (e.g., sagas, transactional outbox), and caching.

· Define the strategy for observability and operational excellence - logging, metrics, distributed tracing, alerting, and SLOs - select the tools and platform investments, and drive org-wide adoption of on-call and incident-response practices.

· Partner with Platform/DevOps to shape CI/CD pipelines, Kubernetes deployment patterns, and infrastructure as code so services ship safely and frequently, with progressive rollouts, feature flags, and fast rollback.

· Serve as a technical escalation point and thought partner for other engineering leads; represent backend engineering in architecture and technical steering discussions.

· Own what “done” looks like for backend work - defining and enforcing the quality bar (unit, integration, contract, and load testing; production-readiness reviews) that ensures every service meets product and operational requirements before it ships.

· Champion the use of AI tools across the SDLC - architecture, code reviews, and test creation - to accelerate delivery, acting as a force multiplier and mentor for teammates.

· Experience using AI tools to improve efficiency in software architecture, code reviews, and software testing.

· 12+ years of experience building and scaling production backend systems, including 5+ years building Go (Golang) microservices in production, with a track record of setting technical direction beyond your own team.

· Deep expertise in Go - concurrency (goroutines, channels, context), performance profiling (pprof), error handling, testing, and idiomatic module and package design - with the judgment to know when to deviate from convention.

· Deep, opinionated expertise in distributed microservice architecture - service decomposition, API design (REST and/or gRPC), resilience patterns (timeouts, retries, circuit breakers, idempotency), and eventual consistency.

· Demonstrated experience influencing technical strategy across multiple teams or a full engineering org, not just within a single codebase.

· Strong track record mentoring and growing senior/staff-level engineers.

· Comfort operating in ambiguity - defining problems and roadmaps, not just solving pre-defined tickets.

· Strong experience operating distributed systems in production - structured logging, metrics, distributed tracing (e.g., OpenTelemetry), SLOs, and incident response - with the ability to set standards other engineers follow.

· Strong SQL database expertise (e.g., PostgreSQL) data modeling, query optimization, indexing, transactions, and zero-downtime schema migrations.

· Experience building and running containerized services on Kubernetes in a public cloud (AWS preferred).

· Deep knowledge of Go testing and static analysis (table-driven tests, race detection, golangci-lint) and of integration and contract testing - treating strong typing, linting, and test coverage as the first line of defense against bugs, especially as more code is written with AI assistance.

Preferred Requirements:

· Knowledge of React and TypeScript is a big plus - enough to understand how the front end consumes backend APIs and to collaborate closely on contract design.

· Hands-on experience with Kafka and event streaming - topic and partition design, consumer groups, delivery semantics, schema evolution, and Kafka Streams.

· Working proficiency in Java, particularly for building and maintaining Kafka Streams applications.

· Experience designing and owning CI/CD pipelines (e.g., GitHub Actions) with automated testing, security scanning, and progressive deployment strategies.

· Experience with infrastructure as code (Terraform).

· Experience integrating with search platforms (e.g., Algolia) and caching layers (e.g., Redis).

· Experience building e-commerce platforms at scale (catalog, orders, inventory, fulfillment).

· Experience leading backend architecture decisions for a platform serving high concurrent traffic.

Tech stack: Go (Golang), Microservices, REST/gRPC, SQL databases, Kafka, Java, Docker, Kubernetes, AWS, Terraform, GitHub Actions, New Relic, Sentry, GitHub.

Depends on Experience