Senior Software Engineer

As a Senior Software Engineer on the XCore team, you will own the foundational layer that every other product at Backstory.ai is built on. From identity and authorization to audit logging and BI data exports, the systems you design set the standard for how the entire engineering organization builds and scales.

This is a true end-to-end ownership role , you'll partner directly with Product to challenge and shape requirements, architect low-latency distributed services that move massive amounts of data with absolute consistency, and see your technical decisions ripple across the entire product.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain highly performant, low-latency APIs and distributed microservices handling identity, authorization, user profiles, settings, and product configurations.
• Own features end-to-end: from partnering with Product to shape and challenge requirements, through system design, implementation, and production monitoring.
• Design and execute data pipelines that move massive volumes of data with guaranteed consistency and zero data loss, including audit-log systems and BI data exports.
• Maintain and improve existing features based on user feedback and evolving product requirements.
• Advocate for and introduce engineering best practices, including structured logging, cross-service request tracking, and robust error management.
• Ensure high-quality observability through alerting, dashboards, tracing, and runbooks for all production services.
• Build reusable internal tooling to reduce manual operations for engineering teams and enable customer support self-service.
• Collaborate cross-functionally with Product, Design, and Engineering teams with clear and concise communication.

Requirements

• 5+ years of professional experience building backend systems in an enterprise environment
• 2+ years of experience programming in Python or Scala
• Proven experience building and orchestrating microservices and service-oriented architectures (SOA)
• Deep understanding of databases, caching strategies, and low-latency service design
• Experience designing clean, scalable APIs with a strong focus on client and end-user experience
• Experience handling data synchronization from diverse external sources and designing high-consistency data pipelines
• Comfortable taking ownership in an unfamiliar or legacy codebase and incrementally refactoring and improving it
• Strong inclination toward automation and reducing manual operational toil
• Experience with Spark or big data processing is a plus
• Strong communication skills with the ability to act as a true partner to Product , challenging requirements and driving roadmap decisions