Lead Backend Engineer (Go)

Lead Backend Engineer (Go)

About AiRISTA

AiRISTA delivers real-time location (RTLS) and IoT solutions that help organizations track assets, people, and conditions. Our platforms combine Wi-Fi, BLE, and GPS tags, sensors, gateways, and enterprise software, deployed in demanding environments where reliability matters. AiRISTA is headquartered in Timonium, Maryland, and maintains a quality management system aligned with ISO 9001 and ISO 27001.

Position Overview

As the Lead Backend Engineer, you will architect, build, and own the backend services that power the Sofia platform. These Go microservices ingest and process high volumes of real-time location and telemetry data from BLE, Wi-Fi, and GPS devices, and serve it to web, mobile, and partner integrations.

This is a hands-on technical leadership role. You will set backend architecture and engineering standards, write production code, and mentor a team of backend engineers. You will work closely with the mobile, RTLS, cloud, infrastructure, and QA teams to deliver services that are secure, fast, and resilient.

Key Responsibilities

1. Architecture & Technical Leadership

• Lead the design and architecture of backend services and microservices for real-time location, telemetry, and event processing.
• Make and document key architectural decisions on service boundaries, data flow, scalability, and resilience.
• Define backend development standards, coding guidelines, and best practices.
• Mentor backend engineers through code reviews, pairing, and design reviews.
• Work with mobile, RTLS, cloud, and infrastructure teams to align data models and integration patterns.

2. Backend Development

• Design, build, and maintain backend services in Go (Golang).
• Develop and optimize RESTful APIs and service interfaces for internal clients and partner integrations.
• Build high-volume, low-latency ingestion pipelines for BLE, Wi-Fi, and GPS telemetry.
• Use Go's concurrency model (goroutines, channels, context) to build efficient, reliable services.
• Profile and tune services for throughput, latency, and memory use.

3. Data & SQL Server

• Design and evolve SQL Server schemas for location, telemetry, and event data.
• Write and optimize queries and stored procedures, and tune indexing for performance at scale.
• Plan data retention, archiving, and growth strategies for high-volume time-based data.

4. Quality, Security & Reliability

• Build automated unit, integration, and API tests, and partner with QA on release validation.
• Apply secure coding practices, authentication, and authorization in line with ISO 27001.
• Add logging, metrics, and monitoring so services are observable and issues are found quickly.
• Support production troubleshooting and root cause analysis for backend issues.

5. Engineering Process & DevOps

• Manage GitHub workflows, branching strategy, and pull request standards.
• Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines for automated build, test, and deployment.
• Containerize services with Docker and support deployment to cloud and on-premises environments.
• Take part in Agile planning, estimation, and sprint ceremonies in Jira.

Required Qualifications

• 7+ years of backend software development, including at least 5 years of professional Go (Golang) development.
• 3+ years in a technical lead or engineering leadership role.
• Deep experience designing and building microservices, REST APIs, and distributed systems.
• Ability to decompose business requirements into technical documents, mapping the requirements to solution components, including:
• Relational database changes, if required
• Real-time data processing architecture
• Service, API, and integration changes
• Strong SQL Server skills, including schema design, stored procedures, indexing, and query tuning.
• Experience building high-throughput data ingestion or event processing systems.
• Hands-on experience with GitHub, Docker, CI/CD pipelines, and automated testing.
• Experience with Agile development and Jira.
• Strong communication skills and the ability to explain technical decisions to engineers and non-engineers.

Preferred Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field.
• Experience with RTLS, IoT, telematics, or other real-time location or sensor data platforms.
• Familiarity with BLE, Wi-Fi, or GPS data and device communication.
• Experience with message brokers or streaming (Kafka, NATS, RabbitMQ, or MQTT).
• Experience with Kubernetes and cloud platforms (AWS or Azure).
• Observability tooling such as Prometheus, Grafana, or OpenTelemetry.
• Experience with time-series data or high-volume data retention strategies.
• Experience working in an ISO 9001 or ISO 27001 environment.

What Makes You Successful Here

• You write clean, well-tested Go and hold others to the same bar.
• You make pragmatic architecture decisions and explain the trade-offs clearly.
• You enjoy mentoring and helping engineers grow.
• You care about performance, reliability, and security in production.
• You work well across teams and are comfortable in a fast-moving environment.