Senior Backend Engineer

What You'll Be Working On

We are looking for a Senior Backend Engineer to build and scale the core services powering the Sibyl Ecosystem. You will own microservices, design high-throughput APIs, and contribute to the Autonomous DB query engine — serving enterprise clients across banking, retail, healthcare, and government.

This is a high-ownership role. You will collaborate directly with product managers and designers, ship features end-to-end, and take responsibility for the performance and reliability of your services in production. Our engineering culture values clean APIs, observable systems, and ruthless prioritisation of business impact over technical complexity for its own sake.

Our stack is PHP (Laravel), Go (for performance-critical services), Python (ML pipelines), PostgreSQL, Redis, Kafka, and Kubernetes. You do not need to know every technology — but you should be deeply excellent in at least one backend language and have genuine curiosity about distributed systems.

What You'll Do

• Design, build, and maintain high-availability backend microservices serving 10M+ API requests per day
• Architect REST and gRPC API contracts in collaboration with frontend and mobile teams
• Contribute to Autonomous DB query planning and execution engine components
• Review code for correctness, performance, and security — raise the bar for the whole team
• Write comprehensive unit, integration, and load tests with measurable reliability targets
• Participate in on-call rotation with a dedicated SRE team for major incidents
• Document your services thoroughly — API specs, runbooks, and architecture decision records
• Mentor junior and mid-level engineers through code review, pair programming, and 1:1s

What We're Looking For

• 4+ years of professional backend engineering experience in production systems
• Deep expertise in at least one of: PHP (Laravel/Symfony), Go, or Python
• Strong understanding of relational databases — PostgreSQL preferred — including query optimisation and indexing
• Experience designing RESTful or gRPC APIs consumed by web and mobile clients
• Working knowledge of distributed systems concepts: idempotency, eventual consistency, circuit breakers
• Experience with containerisation (Docker) and container orchestration (Kubernetes)
• Proficiency with Git, CI/CD pipelines, and automated testing frameworks
• Strong communication skills — able to explain technical decisions clearly to non-engineers

Nice to Have

• Contributions to open-source backend libraries or frameworks
• Experience with Kafka or other event streaming platforms
• Understanding of database internals — storage engines, WAL, MVCC
• Experience building developer-facing APIs (SDK or platform engineering)