Staff Back-end Engineer

Qualifications

• Fluency in English, both spoken and written.
• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience, with substantial experience building and operating backend systems in production.
• Deep production-level proficiency in at least two of the following languages or ecosystems:

• Ruby
• JavaScript / TypeScript with Node.js
• Java with Spring Framework
• Python

• Strong experience designing, developing, and maintaining APIs and backend services.
• Strong knowledge of relational database design and operation, particularly MySQL and/or PostgreSQL.
• Experience analyzing and optimizing database queries, indexes, transactions, and data models.
• Production experience with Redis and RabbitMQ or comparable caching, messaging, or asynchronous processing technologies.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems concepts, including concurrency, failure handling, retries, idempotency, consistency, and asynchronous processing.
• Experience designing and maintaining systems that integrate multiple services, APIs, databases, and external dependencies.
• Experience building, maintaining, and troubleshooting CI/CD pipelines, including GitHub Actions or equivalent tooling.
• Production experience with AWS services and cloud-based architectures.
• Strong working knowledge of Linux environments, including experience troubleshooting applications and infrastructure at the operating-system level.
• Experience working with legacy systems and modern service-oriented or microservice architectures.
• Strong understanding of software testing strategies, including unit, integration, and automated testing.
• Demonstrated experience troubleshooting complex production issues across application, database, infrastructure, and network boundaries.
• Proven ability to independently own complex technical problems from investigation through production resolution.
• Ability to evaluate technical trade-offs and make pragmatic architectural decisions based on business and engineering constraints.
• Experience reviewing technical designs and providing guidance to other engineers.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to explain complex technical concepts clearly.
• Experience working effectively in distributed or remote engineering teams across multiple time zones.
• Reliable high-speed internet connection suitable for full-time remote work.
• Availability to support occasional after-hours production issues when required.

What you'll do

Backend Architecture & Technical Leadership

• Design and evolve backend services, APIs, data models, integrations, and distributed systems.
• Lead technical design for complex initiatives and evaluate architectural alternatives.
• Communicate trade-offs around scalability, reliability, performance, security, and maintainability.
• Identify opportunities to simplify systems, reduce technical debt, and modernize existing architecture.

Software Development & Delivery

• Design, implement, test, review, and deploy production-quality backend software.
• Own complex features and services from technical analysis through deployment and production operation.
• Make pragmatic decisions when working with legacy systems.
• Balance delivery speed, maintainability, and technical risk.

Distributed Systems & Reliability

• Work with relational databases, caching, queues, asynchronous processing, APIs, and service integrations.
• Apply sound judgment around transactions, concurrency, retries, idempotency, failure handling, and data consistency.
• Identify bottlenecks and improve application, database, and system performance.

Operational & Infrastructure Ownership

• Take ownership of the operational health of production systems.
• Improve monitoring, logging, metrics, alerting, CI/CD, and observability.
• Participate in incident response, root cause analysis, and remediation.
• Work comfortably with AWS, hybrid infrastructure, Linux, and on-premise environments.

Technical Leadership & Collaboration

• Provide technical guidance through architecture discussions, code reviews, debugging, documentation, and mentoring.
• Partner with Engineering, Product, Operations, and QA to translate requirements into reliable technical solutions.
• Communicate technical decisions, risks, dependencies, and trade-offs clearly across distributed teams.

Nice to have

• Experience designing high-availability or mission-critical systems.
• Experience with real-time communications, telecommunications, VoIP, WebRTC, SIP, or related technologies.
• Experience operating systems with significant production traffic or strict availability requirements.
• Experience with containerized applications and Docker.
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code or cloud automation.
• Experience designing observability strategies using metrics, logs, tracing, and alerting.
• Experience decomposing or modernizing legacy monolithic systems.
• Experience mentoring engineers or acting as a technical lead on complex projects.

About Dugu

Dugu is a Chilean software engineering company that works with international teams to design, build, and maintain production software and technology platforms. We bring experienced engineers into complex environments where reliability, technical judgment, collaboration, and long-term maintainability matter.

About the role

The Senior Backend Engineer is a key member of the Engineering team, responsible for designing, building, and evolving reliable backend systems and services used in production environments.

This role is intended for an experienced engineer with deep backend expertise who is comfortable working across legacy systems, modern services, databases, messaging infrastructure, cloud environments, and production operations.

You will be expected to take ownership of complex technical problems, make architectural and implementation decisions, identify risks before they become incidents, and help other engineers navigate difficult technical challenges.