Senior Backend Engineer (Platform Operations)
Summary
The Senior Backend Engineer will design and operate the backend infrastructure for a distributed radar platform, focusing on data ingestion, CI/CD pipelines, and cloud-native reliability. The role requires extensive experience with distributed systems, container orchestration, and high-throughput messaging technologies.
## Role Overview
We are looking for a Senior Backend Engineer with a strong operations focus to build and operate the backend of our distributed radar platform. You will work across distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, deployment automation, databases, messaging systems, and observability, with a strong emphasis on reliability and sound engineering practices.
## Key Responsibilities
- Design and build backend services for ingesting, processing, and distributing data from distributed sensor nodes
- Build and maintain reliable CI/CD pipelines and automated deployment workflows
- Establish and operate development, staging, and production environments
- Design systems that degrade gracefully and recover from partial failures
- Operate and improve databases, messaging systems, and other stateful infrastructure
- Build metrics, logging, tracing, and alerting for the platform
- Automate infrastructure using Infrastructure as Code and cloud-native tooling
- Define backend architecture and drive engineering practices, mentoring engineers as the team grows
## Required Qualifications
- Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related discipline, or equivalent practical experience
- 7+ years of professional experience building and operating backend or distributed systems
- Strong understanding of distributed systems, networking, Linux, and production failure modes
- Proficiency in at least one backend language such as Go, Rust, C++, or Python
- Hands-on experience with cloud infrastructure, Infrastructure as Code, Docker, Kubernetes, or comparable container orchestration platforms
- Experience building and operating CI/CD pipelines and production deployment workflows
- Operational experience with databases such as PostgreSQL, including performance tuning, migrations, backups, and recovery
- Experience with real-time or high-throughput data processing using messaging or streaming systems such as Kafka, NATS, RabbitMQ, or similar
## Nice to Have
- Experience operating production systems across multiple cloud providers, on-premises, and edge environments
- Experience with distributed edge or sensor systems
- Experience with observability stacks such as Prometheus, Grafana, and OpenTelemetry
- Experience designing or operating authentication and authorization systems
- Experience with geospatial or time-series data
- Knowledge of database replication, high availability, and disaster recovery
- German language skills are beneficial but not required
## What We Offer
- Competitive compensation package including VSOP participation
- High autonomy and influence on architecture, infrastructure, and tooling
- Direct collaboration with radar, signal processing, and product teams
- Short decision paths
- Flexible hybrid working model
- Office location in Dresden, Germany