Sr. Back-End Engineer

Job Description

Strategic Imperative: The

Sr. Back-End Engineer strengthens the reliability, scalability, and security of our core platform by owning the end-to-end delivery of backend services, APIs, and data-layer solutions that power critical product experiences. This role turns requirements into production-ready systems through sound technical judgment, strong engineering fundamentals, and disciplined execution across design, implementation, testing, deployment, and support. By improving performance, observability, and engineering practices, the Sr. Back-End Engineer reduces operational risk, accelerates delivery velocity, and enables the business to scale with confidence.

Prodege A cutting-edge marketing and consumer insights platform, Prodege has charted a course of innovation in the evolving technology landscape by helping leading brands, marketers, and agencies uncover the answers to their business questions, acquire new customers, increase revenue, and drive brand loyalty & product adoption. Bolstered by a major investment by Great Hill Partners in Q4 2021 and strategic acquisitions of Pollfish, BitBurst & AdGate Media in 2022, Prodege looks forward to more growth and innovation to empower our partners to gather meaningful, rich insights and better market to their target audiences. As an organization, we go the extra mile to “Create Rewarding Moments” every day for our partners, consumers, and team. Come join us today!

Primary Objectives

• End-to-End Feature Delivery & Reliability: Deliver medium-complexity backend features from design through production support, ensuring high quality, stability, and on-time execution.
• Scalable Service & API Development: Design and maintain secure, efficient APIs and service integrations that support evolving product needs and third-party connectivity.
• System Design & Maintainable Architecture: Contribute to design reviews and architecture decisions; produce clear design artifacts and implement scalable, maintainable patterns.
• Performance Optimization & Data Efficiency: Improve backend performance across services and databases through concurrency tuning, caching strategies, query optimization, and indexing.
• Operational Excellence & Incident Readiness: Strengthen monitoring, alerting, dashboards, runbooks, and incident response practices to improve uptime and reduce mean time to resolution.
• Engineering Quality, Security & Standards: Ensure code is clean, testable, secure-by-design, and aligned with best practices through rigorous implementation and code reviews.
• Team Enablement & Cross-Functional Delivery: Mentor junior engineers and partner effectively with Product, QA, and stakeholders to clarify requirements, manage dependencies, and align outcomes to business goals.

Qualifications - To perform this job successfully, an individual must be able to perform each job duty satisfactorily. The requirements listed below are representative of the knowledge, skill, and/or ability required. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions.

Detailed Job Duties

• Own end-to-end delivery of medium-complexity features: Drive features/components from requirements and technical design through implementation, testing, deployment, and ongoing maintenance, ensuring reliability, performance, and on-time delivery.
• Independently execute with sound technical judgment: Make day-to-day technical decisions (tradeoffs, patterns, libraries, implementation approach) with minimal guidance, escalating appropriately when risk or ambiguity is high.
• Contribute to system design and architecture: Participate in design reviews and architecture discussions; propose scalable, maintainable solutions; apply appropriate design patterns and produce clear design artifacts (diagrams, ADRs, design docs) for owned work.
• Develop and integrate APIs and services: Design, implement, and maintain secure and efficient RESTful APIs and service-to-service integrations, including third-party integrations when needed.
• Deliver high-quality, secure code: Write clean, testable, maintainable code that follows company standards and industry best practices; ensure implementations are secure-by-design (authn/authz, encryption where applicable, privacy considerations).
• Lead and participate in code reviews: Perform thorough reviews focused on correctness, maintainability, performance, and security; provide actionable feedback; identify areas requiring deeper review by senior engineers or domain experts.
• Mentor junior engineers: Support the growth of junior teammates via pair programming, technical guidance, debugging help, and knowledge sharing; reinforce best practices in coding, testing, and design.
• Troubleshoot and resolve complex issues: Investigate production and development issues using logs, metrics, and traces; implement durable fixes and preventative measures to avoid recurrence.
• Optimize performance across the stack: Identify bottlenecks and improve performance at the code, API, and database layers (e.g., concurrency, caching strategies, SQL tuning, indexing, query optimization).
• Design and maintain database solutions: Contribute to schema design and data access patterns; write efficient SQL; ensure data integrity and support evolving product requirements.
• Improve engineering processes and tooling: Propose and implement improvements to developer workflows, CI/CD pipelines, testing practices, codebase structure, and operational readiness to increase team velocity and quality.
• Support operational excellence: Help configure monitoring, dashboards, and alerts; improve observability and runbooks; participate in on-call/incident response (as applicable) and post-incident reviews.
• Collaborate cross-functionally: Work closely with Product, Design, QA, and business stakeholders to clarify requirements, estimate work, manage dependencies, and ensure delivered solutions align with business goals.
• Maintain clear documentation: Keep code documentation, READMEs, API contracts, and supporting technical docs current to enable smooth onboarding, maintenance, and future enhancements.

The MUST Haves

• Bachelor’s degree (or equivalent) in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Technology, or a related discipline.
• Four or more (4+) years of experience in a back-end engineering or related role.
• Strong proficiency in Java, including core features (i.e. collections, multithreading, exception handling, I/O), with working knowledge of JavaScript for back-end development and cross-functional projects.
• Solid understanding of SQL and relational database management systems, with the ability to design efficient database schemas and perform optimizations through indexing and query tuning.
• Skilled at debugging complex issues and identifying bottlenecks in both code and infrastructure. Able to apply performance optimization techniques at the code and database levels
• Usage of AI (Github Copilot/Claude Code, etc.)
• Intermediate design skills with the ability to contribute to system architecture discussions and apply common design patterns (e.g., MVC, Singleton, Observer) to solve mid-level complexity problems.
• Ability to apply AI and machine learning tools responsibly in support of predictive modeling, analysis, experimentation, and solution development, including validating outputs, documenting assumptions, and adhering to company security and confidentiality standards.
• Familiarity with essential security concepts such as encryption, authentication, authorization, and securing APIs, with an emphasis on building secure and maintainable applications. Code should be secure and privacy-respecting by design.
• Experienced in refactoring and improving the maintainability and performance of existing codebases, ensuring code adheres to company standards and industry best practices.
• Experienced in system monitoring, and proficient in configuring tools, dashboards, and alerts to optimize application performance and system health. Adept at using logs for issue resolution and data analysis to enhance system reliability and performance
• Strong analytical and troubleshooting skills with the ability to resolve complex infrastructure issues.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills, with the ability to convey technical information clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

The Nice To Haves

• Experience with large-scale distributed systems
• Knowledge of event sourcing and CQRS patterns
• Exposure to frontend frameworks (React, Angular, Vue)
• Experience with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform or equivalent)
• Familiarity with observability platforms (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK stack)
• Experience working in regulated or enterprise compliance environments
• Prior experience in mentoring or technical leadership roles