[Hiring] SDE - III (Backend) @Sun King

Role Description

Our backend systems process millions of transactions, serve enterprise customers across industries, and must perform flawlessly under pressure. We are scaling fast — and the decisions made at the architecture level today will define how the platform operates for years. We are hiring a Lead Backend Engineer to own that responsibility.

This is a technical leadership role with real weight. You will set the architectural direction for core backend services, resolve ambiguity in complex distributed systems, engage directly with Product and DevOps leadership as a peer, not a downstream implementer and be the person the team turns to when things go wrong in production. Your decisions will have a measurable impact on system reliability, engineering velocity, and the careers of the engineers you mentor.

We are looking for an engineer who has operated at this level before — someone who understands that senior engineering skill and technical leadership are not the same thing, and who is ready to take on both with full ownership.

Responsibilities

• Own backend features end-to-end: requirements, design, implementation, testing, and production rollout
• Produce technical design documents for assigned features; present and defend them in design reviews
• Write production-quality Java and Spring Boot code that meets the team’s standards for performance, maintainability, and test coverage
• Identify and address edge cases, failure modes, and scalability constraints at the design stage — not after the fact
• Deliver features on schedule with a consistent track record of quality and low post-release defect rates
• Build and maintain microservices with a focus on reliability, scalability, and clean service boundaries
• Design and optimise interactions with PostgreSQL and MongoDB; write performant queries and schema migrations
• Implement Kafka-based event-driven workflows: consume, produce, and handle failure scenarios correctly
• Use Elasticsearch for search features; understand indexing, mapping, and query construction
• Instrument services with appropriate logging, metrics, and alerting from day one
• Participate in on-call rotations and respond to production incidents with urgency and structure
• Conduct root cause analysis on incidents related to your features and drive preventive improvements
• Proactively monitor system health; surface degradation or risk to the Lead Engineer before it becomes an incident
• Contribute to operational runbooks, post-mortems, and reliability improvement initiatives
• Conduct thorough, constructive code reviews for junior engineers; elevate review quality on the team
• Mentor junior engineers on technical approach, debugging discipline, and engineering best practices
• Collaborate closely with the Lead Engineer on architecture decisions; contribute well-reasoned technical opinions
• Partner with QA, DevOps, and Product to ensure features are delivered with full operational readiness

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent experience
• 5+ years of experience building and maintaining backend systems in production environments
• Strong proficiency in Java with hands-on experience in Spring Boot–based microservices
• Solid understanding of data structures, algorithms, and backend problem solving
• Strong experience with PostgreSQL or other relational databases in high-scale systems
• Experience building and consuming RESTful APIs and working with asynchronous systems
• Strong debugging and troubleshooting skills in live production systems
• Good understanding of software engineering best practices, including testing, code reviews, CI/CD, and release management
• Clear communication skills and ability to collaborate effectively within a team
• Hands-on experience with Kafka or similar messaging/event-streaming platforms
• Exposure to distributed systems, microservices architecture, and scaling strategies
• Experience with Docker and Kubernetes in production environments
• Cloud platform experience (AWS, Azure, or GCP)
• Caching with Redis: cache-aside, TTL strategies, cache invalidation patterns
• Resilience engineering: Circuit Breaker, Bulkhead, Retry, Rate Limiting patterns

Great to have

• Experience using Redis, Elasticsearch, and MongoDB in production systems
• Exposure to SRE or platform engineering practices
• Experience contributing to or leading engineering hiring processes

Benefits

• Professional growth in a dynamic, rapidly expanding, high-social-impact industry
• An open-minded, collaborative culture made up of enthusiastic colleagues who are driven by the challenge of innovation towards profound impact on people and the planet
• A truly multicultural experience: you will have the chance to work with and learn from people from different geographies, nationalities, and backgrounds
• Structured, tailored learning and development programs that help you become a better leader, manager, and professional through the Sun King Center for Leadership