Senior Backend Engineer

Your Role & Mission

As a Senior Backend Engineer at Apollo, you'll be a critical part of a fast-growing company, working on a cross-functional team to build highly scalable systems and set the bar for how we engineer. The way we build has changed: this is an AI-native role. We're not looking for someone who also uses AI, we're looking for someone who thinks with it, forms their own hypotheses, pressure-tests what AI produces, catches its errors, and design more robustly than they could alone.

You'll work in an open, collaborative environment, give and receive hands-on mentorship, and have real opportunities to grow. You'll interface daily with design, front-end, analytics, product, and teams beyond Engineering. You enjoy working cross-functionally to solve hard problems and make an impact. You strive for quality, are obsessed with improving it, automation, monitoring, squashing the bugs that sneak through and you're always investigating performance improvements and better ideas.

Daily Adventures & Responsibilities

• Design and implement highly scalable, highly available backend services with proper monitoring and alerting in place
• Ramp quickly into large, unfamiliar codebases, de-risk your changes, understand blast radius, and ship with confidence
• Use AI as a core part of your workflow: generate and pressure-test approaches, verify and catch AI's mistakes, and stand behind the quality of the code you ship with it
• Drive the full lifecycle of software development: product requirements, architecture, solution design, development, quality assurance, and maintenance, ownership doesn't end at deploy
• Scope and reshape under-specified problems, and write clear design docs that satisfy real product needs
• Partner closely with PMs: translate product intent into technical decisions, surface the technical realities they need to make good calls, and push back on the spec when reality changes the answer
• Mentor others on best practices and effectively share knowledge to up-level the team
• Communicate progress clearly to the product lead, engineering manager, and other stakeholders
• Introduce new technologies and ideas when they earn their place
• Give and receive technical and behavioral feedback; engage in scrum ceremonies, team culture, an