Senior Backend Engineer (Java/Scala) (Greenwood Village)
Title: Senior Backend Engineer (Java/Scala)Location : Greenwood Village CO (Onsite)About the RoleWe're looking for a senior engineer who doesn't just write code - they own outcomes. You'll be responsible for the full lifecycle of backend services: from design and development through production reliability. In an era where AI can generate code, we value engineers who think critically, anticipate problems, and drive systems forward.What We ExpectEnd-to-End Ownership- Own features from design -> development -> testing -> deployment -> production support- Take accountability for the reliability and performance of your services in production- Drive technical decisions without waiting to be told what to doSystem Design & Architecture- Design scalable, resilient distributed systems handling millions of daily transactions- Make pragmatic trade-off decisions (consistency vs. availability, complexity vs. speed)- Produce clear technical design documents and lead design reviews- Evaluate build vs. buy decisions with dataDevelopment- Strong proficiency in Java and/or Scala- Build high-throughput, low-latency microservices- Write clean, maintainable code - but more importantly, know when and what to buildTesting & Quality- Write meaningful unit, integration, and contract tests - not just for coverage metrics- Own E2E test strategy for your services- Build confidence in deployments through automated validationInfrastructure & Cloud (AWS)- Hands-on with AWS services (ECS/EKS, Lambda, S3, SQS, CloudWatch, IAM)- Understand networking, security, and cost implications of architectural choices- Comfortable with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform/CloudFormation)Data & Messaging- Kafka - design event-driven architectures, manage topics, handle consumer lag and rebalancing- Redis - caching strategies, pub/sub, cluster management- MongoDB/DocumentDB - schema design, indexing, query optimization, aggregation pipelinesMonitoring & Observability- Datadog - build dashboards, set meaningful alerts, track SLOs, analyze APM traces- Splunk - log analysis, search queries, correlation across services for incident investigation- Understand distributed tracing, structured logging, and metric-driven decision makingSRE Mindset- Analyze production incidents: read logs, trace requests, identify root cause under pressure- Think about failure modes before they happen (circuit breakers, retries, fallbacks, graceful degradation)- Participate in on-call rotations and drive blameless post-mortems- Proactively identify capacity risks and performance bottlenecksProactive Analysis & Innovation- Identify risks, tech debt, and performance bottlenecks before they become incidents- Propose and drive improvements - don't wait for a ticket- Stay current with industry trends and bring relevant ideas to the team- Challenge existing patterns when they no longer serve the systemWhat This Role is NOT- A pure coding role - AI can write code; we need engineers who decide what to build and why- A ticket-taker role - you identify work, not just execute it- A siloed role - you'll collaborate across teams, influence architecture, and mentor othersNice to Have- Experience with circuit breaker patterns (Hystrix, Resilience4j)- Performance tuning at scale (JVM, GC, thread pools, connection pools)- Experience with CI/CD pipelines and deployment strategies (blue-green, canary)- Contributions to internal tooling or developer experience improvements- Experience leading technical initiatives across multiple teams