Backend Engineering Specialist

Backend Engineering Specialist

Location: Chicago, IL (Hybrid)

Overview

A financial technology organization building next-generation market infrastructure, is seeking a Backend Engineering Specialist to help design and develop highly scalable distributed systems.

This role focuses on building performance-critical services responsible for processing large volumes of real-time transactional data. You will collaborate closely with senior engineers and architects to design resilient systems capable of operating at very high throughput with strict reliability and latency requirements.

This is an opportunity to work on technically challenging backend systems where architecture, performance optimization, and system reliability are critical.

Responsibilities System Design & Architecture

• Contribute to the design and evolution of a distributed backend platform supporting high-volume transactional workloads.

• Work closely with senior engineers to design services responsible for core transaction processing and system state management.

• Participate in architecture discussions around messaging systems, event-driven design, and scalable microservices patterns.

• Evaluate design tradeoffs between performance, reliability, and maintainability.

Backend Development

• Develop high-performance backend services responsible for core processing workflows.

• Build distributed systems leveraging event-streaming technologies and relational databases.

• Implement APIs and integration layers supporting real-time system interaction.

• Optimize backend services for high throughput and low-latency performance.

Data & Messaging Infrastructure

• Design systems that efficiently process high volumes of event-driven data streams.

• Work with technologies such as Kafka and PostgreSQL to support scalable event processing and data persistence.

• Implement efficient data access and storage patterns for high-volume operational workloads.

Reliability & Operations

• Participate in operational monitoring, troubleshooting, and production incident response.

• Ensure system reliability, observability, and performance across distributed services.

• Contribute to platform improvements around performance tuning, monitoring, and scalability.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of professional backend software engineering experience

• Strong proficiency in Java and JVM-based development

• Experience designing and building distributed systems or microservices architectures

• Hands-on experience with event-driven architectures or streaming platforms (Kafka or similar)

• Experience working with relational databases such as PostgreSQL

• Experience developing RESTful or real-time APIs

• Familiarity with systems handling high-throughput workloads and low-latency processing

Preferred

• Experience working with real-time financial or transactional systems

• Experience optimizing concurrency, performance, and memory usage in JVM-based services

• Familiarity with containerized or cloud-based deployment environments

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