Backend Platform Engineer

Backend Platform Engineer Backend Platform Engineer Java · Spring Boot · Distributed Systems ClearlyRated · USA (Remote-West Coast Only) · Engineering PLEASE NOTE : Applicants should be located in the Pacific Time Zone or be willing to relocate to this time zone at their own expense. PLEASE NOTE : Applicants must be authorized to work in the United States without requiring visa sponsorship. We are unable to support Student Visa as well. We’re building the integration backbone that connects enterprise data systems, moves events at scale, and powers survey automation for some of the world’s largest professional services firms. If you love distributed systems, API design, and clean backend engineering — read on. About ClearlyRated ClearlyRated is a B2B SaaS platform that helps professional services firms — from global engineering consultancies to staffing agencies — measure, understand, and act on client satisfaction data. Our NPS-driven platform processes millions of survey interactions, powers real-time relationship health scoring, and is in the middle of a significant platform evolution: new data integration architecture, event-driven survey automation, and a growing AI/ML capability stack built on Google Cloud. We’re a small, focused engineering team building systems that operate at enterprise scale. That means the problems are real, the stakes are high, and every engineer on the team does work that matters.

Key Responsibilities

What You’ll Build

• Real systems that enterprise clients depend on. Not greenfield experiments, but a world class brand new platform with production code that has to be correct, observable, and resilient:
• Integration layer that ingests structured data from enterprise sources (Snowflake, BigQuery, SQL databases) and routes it through our platform
• A Snowflake-to-BigQuery bridge over ODBC: custom infrastructure work that will serve as the pattern for all future enterprise integrations
• Webhook-triggered survey automation engine. Business events in the client’s system translate into survey sends through a reliable, auditable event pipeline
• REST APIs consumed by our frontend, enterprise integrations, and third-party clients — you’ll design contracts that have to last
• Event-driven microservices on GCP Pub/Sub and Kafka — async processing, backpressure handling, dead-letter queues, the full picture
• Security and SSO integration for enterprise clients with complex credential and access models
• Permission and access control systems that reflect matrix organizational hierarchies — the authorization layer is genuinely interesting here

Skills, Knowledge and Expertise Our Stack Java 18+ Spring Boot MySQL / PostgreSQL Kafka GCP Pub/Sub BigQuery Kubernetes REST APIs CI/CD .NET / C# What We’re Looking For

• Java you understand at the JVM level. Concurrency, memory model, garbage collection, exception hierarchy — you can reason about what the runtime is doing, not just what your code says.
• Spring Boot / Spring ecosystem depth. Or deep understanding of dependency injection and IoC from another framework — we care that you understand the pattern, not just the annotations.
• SQL and data modelling confidence. You can write a query with joins, aggregations, and window functions. You think about indexes. You understand what an N+1 problem looks like in production.
• API design instincts. You know what makes an API contract good and what makes it a maintenance nightmare. You’ve thought about versioning, error semantics, and idempotency.
• Systems thinking under failure. You consider retries, timeouts, idempotency, and consistency before you consider happy paths.
• You’ve built something that handles real load. Even in a personal or academic context — something where correctness and reliability were actual constraints, not just nice-to-haves.

Bonus Points

• .NET / C# experience is a genuine plus. We maintain services in both ecosystems. Engineers who can move across the Java–.NET boundary are valuable.
• GCP experience: Pub/Sub, Dataflow, BigQuery, Vertex AI
• Kafka or other message queue experience: consumer groups, offset management, partition strategy
• Kubernetes and container orchestration
• Event sourcing or CQRS patterns
• Experience with observability tooling — distributed tracing, structured logging, alerting on the things that matter