Backend Engineer

The role

As our Backend Engineer, you will be reporting directly to our Engineering Manager and will work closely with our Product team to develop new products, scale existing ones and manage deployments and architecture. You won't just take tickets here.

You'll dig into how the system actually works, ask why before how, and chase a problem past the surface to the real cause. Curiosity isn't a nice-to-have on this team, it's how we build.

What you will do

Design, build and maintain APIs, services and systems and debug production issues across multiple levels of the stack.

What you need

Bachelor's or Master's Degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering or equivalent work experience in the field.
Work Experience: Minimum 5+ years of experience in a technical role designing, developing and releasing technical solutions and building production systems.
Curious by Default: You dig deeper instead of following instructions to the letter. When something in the system surprises you, you chase the why, not just the fix. You treat every layer of the stack as something worth understanding, and you ask the good questions early.
System Architecture: You understand how parts of a system fit together and have a strong background in building scalable products or systems. You are comfortable in dealing with lots of moving pieces/data sources and possess meticulous attention to detail. You are quick to generate ideas and give suggestions on how to improve the tech stack and feature developments.
First Principles Thinker: When you explain a past decision, the trade-offs come out before the tools. You name the constraint, the alternatives you considered, and why you picked what you picked. You don't reach for a new framework when a tighter use of an existing tool would do the job.
You use AI tools (Copilot, Cursor, Claude, etc.) where they make you faster, and you know exactly where they fall short. You read what they produce, you don't just paste it. You can defend a code path the AI suggested, or override it with reasoning the AI couldn't have known. You flag AI-assisted decisions in code review and submissions without being asked. We treat AI as a tool that makes good thinking faster, not a shortcut around thinking.
Team Player: You have experience working in a diverse, dynamic and cross-cultural team. This role is an opportunity to drive engineering excellence within the team and participate in key architectural discussions. You are a hands-on goal-orientated engineer who works according to milestones and software guidelines, following agile principles.
Empathetic Communicator: You can communicate nuanced ideas clearly, from real-time remote brainstorming to explaining a technical decision in writing. You may be opinionated, but in disagreements you engage thoughtfully with other perspectives and can compromise when needed.
You've either been an early engineering hire at a startup where you took a technical product from scratch to scale, OR you've owned real system design at a FAANG-tier engineering org, defended architectural decisions in actual design reviews, not just contributed to someone else's blueprint. Either path counts! We'd love to hear the learnings and the trade-offs you'd make differently today.
Tech Stack: Ideally you are proficient with Python-based backend programming, web frameworks like Flask, Amazon Web Services. You are able to design RESTful APIs and are aware of best practices. Experience with Docker, Git, Elasticsearch, Spark, CI/CD is a plus. The specific stack matters less than how you reason about it. Strong engineers in any stack pick ours up quickly.

Backend Engineer

The role

What you will do

Backend Engineer

The role

What you will do

What you need

Pay and benefits

Our CORE Values Guide Everything We Do

About Portcast

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