Backend Engineer Job Description Template

The backend engineer builds the services, data models and interfaces that everything else depends on. The work covers API design, data storage, background processing and the reliability of systems that other teams and external integrators build against. Decisions made here are harder to change later than almost anywhere else in the stack, so clarity about data models and contracts matters early.

Typical Duties and Responsibilities

• Design and build backend services and APIs
• Model data and design schemas for correctness and performance
• Implement background processing, queues and scheduled work
• Optimize query and endpoint performance
• Build observability into services so failures are diagnosable
• Design API contracts with versioning and backward compatibility in mind
• Write tests covering business logic and integration paths
• Participate in on call and resolve production incidents
• Manage schema migrations safely against live data
• Collaborate with front end and mobile engineers on interfaces

Education

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science or equivalent practical experience

Required Skills and Experience

• 3+ years of backend development in production
• Strong skills in a backend language such as Python, Go, Java, Ruby or Node.js
• Solid relational database design and query optimization
• Experience designing and versioning APIs
• Understanding of caching, queuing and asynchronous processing
• Familiarity with cloud infrastructure and deployment
• Good testing practice
• Experience running services in production

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with event driven architecture
• Exposure to performance work at scale