Senior Backend Engineer

Location: Brooklyn, NY or Bay Area preferred

Mathpix is looking for a Senior Backend Engineer passionate about building robust, scalable distributed systems that power mission-critical applications. This role involves working across multiple layers of the stack, from databases and message queues to container orchestration and observability systems. Youll play a key role in shaping how our engineering teams build, scale, and operate services that need to perform reliably under real-world load.

The ideal candidate is excited about tackling complex technical challenges, designing resilient architectures, and improving developer productivity through better tooling and infrastructure.

Responsibilities:

• Design and build distributed systems with a focus on scalability, resilience, and maintainability
• Develop tools for observability and monitoring, enabling teams to quickly detect, diagnose, and resolve issues
• Architect and optimize data-intensive systems, ensuring high availability, performance, and consistency
• Enhance developer productivity by improving CI/CD pipelines, containerization, and infrastructure-as-code

Required skills:

• 5+ years of experience with distributed systems, message queues, and observability pipelines
• Strong experience with SQL databases
• Expertise in Kubernetes (K8s) and Docker
• Experience building and maintaining microservices in production, including service-to-service communication and API design
• Hands-on experience with Redis for caching and fast data access
• Knowledge of message queues (e.g., RabbitMQ) for distributed event-driven architectures

Nice to have:

• Proficiency in Python, Node.js, Java, and/or Golang for building and maintaining APIs and services
• Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure)
• Familiarity with observability tooling (e.g., OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana)
• Contributions to open-source projects or thought leadership in distributed systems