Senior Backend Software Engineer

About the Role

We’re building a mobile-first information platform and are approaching production launch. We’re looking for a Senior Backend Software Engineer to co-own our backend architecture and ensure the system is scalable, reliable, and production-ready.

This role is ideal for someone who enjoys designing systems and running them in the real world — handling performance bottlenecks, debugging production issues, and improving reliability as usage grows.

You’ll work closely with a small team and have meaningful influence over architecture, infrastructure decisions, and engineering practices.

What You’ll Do

System Design & Scalability

• Review and improve backend system architecture for scale and reliability
• Identify and resolve performance bottlenecks across services, databases, and caches
• Design data models and APIs that scale as traffic and usage grow
• Improve caching strategies and consistency patterns

Database & Performance

• Optimize MySQL schemas, queries, and indexing strategies
• Analyze slow queries and improve transaction performance
• Plan for read scaling (replicas, partitioning strategies, etc.)

Production Reliability & Operations

• Improve observability: logging, metrics, tracing, dashboards, and alerts
• Debug and resolve production issues, including intermittent and edge-case failures
• Design systems with resilience in mind (timeouts, retries, circuit breakers)
• Participate in on-call and incident response as needed

Release Safety & Engineering Discipline

• Improve deployment safety (blue-green, canary, rollback strategies)
• Design safe database migration and backward-compatible changes
• Contribute to engineering best practices and post-incident improvements

Our Tech Stack

• Backend: Java, Spring Boot
• Infrastructure: AWS ECS (Fargate), ALB, CloudWatch
• Database: MySQL (RDS)
• Caching: AWS ElastiCache (Redis)
• Client: React Native (mobile)
• CI/CD: GitHub Actions

Experience with similar stacks is welcome; deep backend and system design fundamentals matter most.

What We’re Looking For

Required

• 5+ years of backend engineering experience
• Strong system design and distributed systems fundamentals
• Experience building and operating production backend services
• Solid understanding of relational databases and query optimization
• Experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS preferred)
• Ability to debug complex issues under real-world constraints
• Fluent spoken Mandarin required; ability to participate in technical discussions and collaborate with Mandarin-speaking stakeholders.

Strong Plus

• Experience with Spring Boot in high-traffic systems
• Hands-on experience with MySQL performance tuning
• Experience with caching systems
• Familiarity with observability tools (metrics, tracing, logging)
• Startup or small-team experience with high ownership