Principal Backend Engineer
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Job Description
Principal Backend Engineer architecting scalable backend systems for NovoEd’s platform. Leading technical initiatives and improving development practices while mentoring engineers.
Responsibilities:
- Design and implement scalable, secure, and maintainable backend systems primarily using Ruby on Rails. Lead the architecture and development of backend services with a strong focus on performance, reliability, and long-term maintainability. Contribute to both new feature development and modernization of legacy systems.
- Use modern development workflows—including AI-assisted coding tools and coding agents—to accelerate development while maintaining rigorous engineering standards. Evaluate and validate AI-generated code to ensure correctness, security, and architectural consistency.
- Lead the design and development of APIs (REST, GraphQL) that enable reliable communication between internal services and external platforms. Integrate third-party services while ensuring performance, security, and data integrity.
- Collaborate closely with frontend teams to ensure clean service boundaries and consistent system behavior. Use modern tooling and AI-assisted workflows to improve API development, testing, and documentation.
- Design and optimize relational databases to support high-performance and scalable applications. Ensure schemas, queries, and indexing strategies support complex workloads and evolving product needs.
- Identify and resolve performance bottlenecks using observability tools and modern diagnostics, including AI-assisted analysis when appropriate.
- Own initiatives that improve platform performance, reliability, and overall engineering productivity. Identify systemic technical debt, architectural constraints, or operational inefficiencies that slow development or impact customer experience, and lead cross-team efforts to address them. Drive improvements to platform capabilities, developer tooling, and system architecture that enable teams to ship high-quality software more efficiently as the platform scales.
- Drive the strategic identification and prioritization of technical debt across the platform. Identify systemic architectural constraints, legacy patterns, or platform-level inefficiencies that impact scalability, development velocity, or customer experience. Partner with engineering leadership and product teams to prioritize remediation efforts based on technical risk and business impact.
- Drive engineering improvements that increase developer productivity and accelerate the delivery of reliable, high-quality features. Identify systemic bottlenecks in development workflows, infrastructure, or platform architecture that slow down teams, and lead initiatives to address them.
- Serve as a technical leader in identifying and addressing complex issues that impact the reliability, performance, and scalability of the platform. Rather than focusing solely on reactive debugging, analyze production incidents and operational patterns to uncover systemic problems affecting the system.
Requirements:
- 12+ years of software development experience with a strong foundation in backend development, including building and maintaining scalable systems.
- 4+ years of hands-on experience with Ruby on Rails in production environments.
- Experience with Sidekiq for background job processing and Redis for caching and queuing systems.
- Proven experience in database design and optimization, particularly with SQL and PostgreSQL.
- Experience developing APIs (REST or GraphQL) and integrating with third-party systems or services.
- Proficiency with Docker for containerization and familiarity with AWS infrastructure for deployment and scaling.
- Experience managing technical debt while continuing to deliver new features.
- Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines, automated testing strategies, and backend development best practices.
- Strong understanding of system architecture, infrastructure, and deployment strategies using Docker and AWS.
- Must have Computer Science or Engineering degree
- Demonstrated fluency with modern AI-assisted development workflows, including coding assistants or autonomous coding agents.
- Experience incorporating AI-enabled tools into daily engineering workflows while critically evaluating their outputs.
Benefits:
- NovoEd is an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees and applicants. Employment decisions are made without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state, or local laws. This policy applies to all aspects of employment, including recruiting.
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