About The Role
We're looking for a senior Backend API Engineer with 8+ years of experience building and scaling production APIs, including at least 4 years working hands-on with FastAPI. You will design, build, and maintain high-performance, secure backend services, and act as a technical leader on architecture and system design decisions.
Experience Requirements
- 8+ years of overall experience building and operating backend APIs in production environments
- Minimum 4 years of hands-on experience with FastAPI specifically (not just general Python API frameworks)
- Demonstrated experience owning services end-to-end — design, development, deployment, and monitoring
- Prior experience mentoring engineers or leading technical design discussions is a plus
Required Skills (Mandatory)
4+ years of deep, hands-on production experience — routing, dependency injection, async endpoints, middleware, background tasks
Strong command of data validation, serialization, custom validators, and schema design (v1/v2)
Caching strategies, pub/sub, session/token storage, expiry and eviction policies
Core Skills (Working Knowledge Expected)
- System Design — ability to architect scalable, fault-tolerant, high-throughput backend systems
- Authentication & Authorization — OAuth2, RBAC, secure API access patterns
- JWT — token issuance, validation, refresh flows, and security best practices
- HTTPX — async HTTP client usage for reliable service-to-service communication
- API Design — RESTful principles, versioning, rate limiting, backward compatibility
- Message Queues — experience with Kafka, RabbitMQ, SQS, or Celery for async processing
- L1 Cache Handling — in-memory/application-level caching alongside Redis (L2) for low-latency reads
- Exception Handling (RFC 9457) — standardized Problem Details for HTTP APIs error responses
- SQL — strong working knowledge of relational databases (PostgreSQL/MySQL), query optimization, and ORM usage (SQLAlchemy)
Responsibilities
- Design and develop high-performance RESTful APIs using FastAPI with clean, validated schemas via Pydantic
- Architect scalable backend systems, making sound trade-offs on performance, reliability, and maintainability
- Implement multi-layer caching (Redis + in-memory L1 cache) to optimize latency and throughput
- Build secure authentication/authorization flows using JWT and OAuth2
- Integrate with external and internal services using async HTTP clients (HTTPX)
- Design and consume message queues for asynchronous and event-driven processing
- Implement standardized, consistent error handling following RFC 9457
- Write efficient, optimized SQL queries and review database interaction patterns
- Drive system design discussions and review architecture proposals across teams
- Write unit/integration tests and uphold high code quality and observability standards
Nice to Have
- Experience with Docker, Kubernetes, and CI/CD pipelines
- Familiarity with observability tools (logging, tracing, metrics)
- Exposure to microservices architecture at scale
