Backend Software Engineer

ClearlyRated is a B2B SaaS platform that helps professional services firms measure, understand, and act on client satisfaction data. The Backend Software Engineer will design and build resilient, observable, event-driven backend services, APIs, integrations, survey automation workflows, and enterprise security and authorization systems.

Responsibilities:

• System, Database and API design as a first-class skill. You'll design service boundaries, data models, and REST API contracts (consumed by our frontend, enterprise integrations, and third-party clients) that have to last. Versioning, backward compatibility, idempotency, and clean error contracts are core to the job, not afterthoughts
• Event-driven microservices on GCP Pub/Sub: async processing, backpressure handling, dead-letter queues, the full picture
• Webhook-triggered survey automation engine. Business events in the client's system translate into survey sends through a reliable, auditable, event-driven workflow
• Resilient, observable services: retries, timeouts, circuit breakers, structured logging, metrics, and tracing baked into how we build
• 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
• An integration layer that connects enterprise data sources to our platform through well-designed service interfaces

Requirements:

• Applicants must be authorized to work in the United States without requiring visa sponsorship
• 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
• 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