Backend Software Engineer

About the Role

We're looking for a backend engineer who can own and evolve our Ticketing & Ride Request (TRR) system — the service that handles everything from a rider tapping "Request a Ride" to a vehicle arriving at their station. This is a high-throughput, event-driven system where reliability isn't optional; real people are standing on a platform waiting for their ride.

You'll also contribute to the broader backend infrastructure that supports our suite of applications — think message queues, caching layers, database performance, and service-to-service communication. If you've ever been the person on your team who gets pulled into debugging the weird one, you'll feel at home here.

What You'll Work On

• Designing and maintaining the TRR backend — ride matching, station queueing, request lifecycle management, and fare calculation
• Building and operating services on top of PostgreSQL, Redis, and RabbitMQ in a Kubernetes environment
• Improving system observability — tracing, metrics, alerting — so we catch problems before riders do
• Collaborating on API design with our frontend, mobile, and operations teams
• Participating in incident response and post-mortems; we run blameless retros and expect engineers to dig into root causes, not just restart pods
• Contributing to capacity planning and load testing as we scale to new deployment sites

What We're Looking For

You should have strong experience building backend systems that handle real traffic at meaningful scale. Specifically:

• Deep fluency in at least one backend language (TypeScript/Node.js, Go, Python, or Java) — we use TypeScript heavily but value polyglot thinkers
• Hands-on experience with PostgreSQL (query optimization, indexing strategies, schema migrations) and Redis (caching patterns, pub/sub, rate limiting)
• Familiarity with message broker patterns — RabbitMQ preferred, but Kafka or NATS experience translates well
• Solid understanding of distributed systems fundamentals: consistency models, failure modes, backpressure, idempotency
• Experience with Kubernetes in production — not just deploying, but debugging networking issues, resource contention, and pod lifecycle surprises
• Strong debugging instincts: you're the kind of engineer who reaches for tcpdump or strace before restarting the service