Backend Engineer

We are hiring a Backend Engineer to strengthen the foundation of Primates' test orchestration platform. You will work on the systems that manage test execution across distributed infrastructure, process millions of test results daily, and provide the APIs that power both our web application and our CLI tools. Our backend is built primarily in Go, with some Python services for machine learning workloads. We run on Kubernetes (EKS) with a microservices architecture that communicates through gRPC for synchronous calls and Apache Kafka for event-driven workflows. Data is stored across PostgreSQL (transactional), ClickHouse (analytics), and Redis (caching and real-time state). The platform handles burst workloads of over 50,000 concurrent test executions during peak hours, requiring careful attention to resource management, queue prioritization, and graceful degradation. In this role, you will design and implement new backend services, optimize existing ones for performance and reliability, and contribute to our infrastructure-as-code practices. You will own features end-to-end, from database schema design through API implementation to deployment and monitoring. We value engineers who think holistically about the systems they build -- considering not just whether the code works, but how it fails, how it scales, and how it will be maintained by the team over time. We are a remote-first company for this role, with team members distributed across North American time zones. We use asynchronous communication as our default mode (long-form write-ups in Notion, code reviews in GitHub, and discussions in Slack threads), with synchronous meetings limited to design reviews, sprint planning, and one-on-ones. We believe that thoughtful written communication produces better technical decisions than ad-hoc verbal discussions, and we structure our processes accordingly. You will participate in our on-call rotation, which covers the backend services that our customers depend on for CI/CD pipeline integration. The rotation is staffed at two engineers per shift, with comprehensive runbooks and escalation paths. We invest heavily in observability (Datadog for metrics, structured logging, and distributed tracing) to make on-call manageable and educational rather than stressful.