Senior Backend Engineer

About the role

We are seeking a Senior Backend Engineer to join the Sightline detection engineering team. You will design, build, and operate high-scale, low-latency backend services that score and protect web and API traffic against automated abuse, working at the core of HUMAN’s real-time detection platform.

What you’ll do:

- High-Scale Engineering: Design, build, and maintain distributed, high-throughput backend services processing hundreds of thousands of requests per second with strict tens-of-milliseconds latency targets.

- End-to-End Ownership: Own services from architecture and implementation to deployment and reliability. This includes full-stack instrumentation (monitoring, alerting, and tracing) to detect and mitigate production issues.

- Product Innovation: Implement and evolve real-time detection and decisioning flows within the Sightline Cyberfraud Defense platform, collaborating with security researchers, data science, and product teams.

- Cloud-Native Operations: Build and operate services in a Kubernetes environment using a modern GitOps stack (Go, Kafka, Redis, MongoDB, BigQuery, ArgoCD, Pulumi, Crossplane), ensuring robust rollout strategies and safe migrations.

- AI-Forward Engineering: Demonstrate a deep passion for the AI-first development frontier and an expert-level ability to leverage assistants and agents to radically accelerate the entire lifecycle - from architectural scaffolding to automated tasks, skills, and complex debugging/testing.

- Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner with adjacent teams to design end-to-end flows that balance security, performance, and customer experience.

- Technical Leadership: Contribute to technical design reviews and code reviews, raising the bar for quality and operational excellence across the team.

Who you are:

- Experience: 5+ years of experience building backend services with a strong grasp of modern distributed systems design.

- Language Proficiency: High proficiency in at least one backend language such as Go, Java, or Scala, including a strong command of concurrency and multithreading concepts.

- Cloud Infrastructure: Proven experience building and operating production systems in a major cloud provider (GCP or similar), including containerized workloads and CI/CD pipelines.

- Data Systems: Hands-on experience with datastores and messaging systems (e.g., MongoDB, Redis, Kafka, or Postgres).

- Networking & APIs: Solid understanding of networking fundamentals, HTTP-based services, and best practices for secure, reliable APIs.

- Troubleshooting: Practical experience with monitoring tools (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, Opsgenie) and resolving complex, distributed production issues.

- Delivery: Comfortable working both independently on complex technical problems and as part of a collaborative team, driving projects end-to-end.

Nice to Have

- Previous experience in security, fraud detection, or risk scoring systems, especially in high-volume web or API environments.