Senior Backend Software Engineer

About Onebrief

Onebrief is a cutting-edge collaboration and AI-driven workflow software tailored for military staffs. By revolutionizing this process, Onebrief empowers teams to become faster, smarter, and more efficient.

We embody ownership, excellence, and a competitive spirit akin to an Olympic team. While we are an all-remote organization, many of our employees collaborate directly with military commands across the globe.

Founded in 2019 by seasoned planners, Onebrief has a diverse team of veterans and technology experts from renowned software firms. Having secured over $123 million in funding from prestigious investors like Battery Ventures, General Catalyst, Insight Partners, and Human Capital, Onebrief is valued at $1.1 billion. This growth allows us to make significant impacts where it matters most.

About the Role

We are seeking a Senior Backend Engineer to play a pivotal role in designing, building, and maintaining our platform's core systems. This hands-on position emphasizes performance, reliability, and operational excellence. Our backend utilizes state-of-the-art languages, frameworks, and cloud-native technology. We prioritize strong problem-solving abilities and sound engineering judgment over rote mastery of any single technology.

In this role, you'll engage with high-impact systems, including but not limited to our core backend services, databases, monitoring solutions, and metrics pipelines. Prepare to address challenges related to scaling, performance, data modeling, fault tolerance, observability, and disaster recovery. You'll influence architecture and contribute to both operational and long-term strategies.

If you enjoy navigating trade-offs, working across various tech layers, and solving real-world system challenges, you will thrive here.

What You'll Do

1. Design, build, and maintain backend services that drive essential platform functionalities.
2. Improve and optimize the data model for enhanced scalability, performance, and reusability.
3. Work across the technology stack from APIs and databases to deployment and observability.
4. Troubleshoot and resolve production performance, scalability, and reliability issues.
5. Collaborate on architecture and operational strategies for highly available systems.
6. Establish and enhance monitoring, alerting, and metrics collection practices.
7. Balance long-term engineering quality with timely deliveries.

What We Look For

• 5+ years of experience in backend software development.
• B.S. in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.
• Proficient in one or more backend programming languages (e.g., Node.js, Python, Java, Go).
• Strong understanding of scalable API design and construction (REST, GraphQL, gRPC).
• Extensive experience with relational and/or non-relational databases, data modeling, and query optimization.
• Demonstrated capability to design, implement, and maintain distributed systems.
• Solid knowledge of application performance tuning, reliability, and security best practices.
• Hands-on experience with containerization and cloud infrastructure (Docker, Kubernetes, AWS/GCP/Azure).
• Proven ability to collaborate across functions (product, design, frontend, DevOps) to create comprehensive solutions.
• Excellent communication skills with the ability to articulate technical trade-offs clearly.
• Proven track record of ownership and the successful delivery of complex projects in a dynamic environment.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in mission-critical domains.
• Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, and deployment workflows.
• Prior involvement in architecture and system design for complex, high-scale applications.
• Knowledge of event-driven and service-oriented architectures (Kafka, Pub/Sub, microservices).
• Understanding of observability stacks (logging, metrics, tracing) and incident response methodologies.
• Experience with data sharding and logical data partitioning strategies.
• Familiarity with message queues, streaming platforms, or event buses.
• Experience with security/compliance requirements (e.g., SOC2, FedRAMP, HIPAA).