Backend Engineer

Since 2020, the company has expanded from listings into payments, shipping and seller financing.

Position summary:

This is a new position created as the team has grown over the last year. The Notifications team owns services that process several million requests a day. We need another engineer who is comfortable owning them in production. Fully remote. You can work from anywhere in South Africa. We keep meetings to a minimum and work mostly async. Please make sure you have a quiet place to work and a solid internet connection.

Job duties:

• Coordinate with frontend and mobile engineers on API contracts and versioning.
• Model data and write migrations for PostgreSQL, MySQL or DynamoDB.
• Handle on-call for services the team owns and lead incident follow-ups.
• Design and build REST and gRPC APIs in Go, Java or Python.
• Instrument services with metrics, structured logs and OpenTelemetry traces.
• Review code for correctness, performance and failure handling.
• Tune slow queries, add indexes and read query plans.
• Write integration and contract tests so API changes don't break consumers.

Minimum qualifications:

• 3+ years of backend development experience in a production environment.
• Clear written communication, including design docs.
• Understanding of concurrency, transactions, idempotency and retries.
• Hands-on experience with AWS, GCP or Azure services.
• Proficiency in at least one of Go, Java, Kotlin, Python, C# or Node.js.
• Experience designing and versioning HTTP APIs.
• Comfort reading logs, metrics and traces to debug problems in production.

Preferred:

• Background with high-volume payment or ledger systems.
• Prior work breaking up a monolith.
• Terraform or Pulumi.

What we offer:

• Medical aid contribution.
• Provident fund.
• Data allowance.
• Group life cover.

Start: Within 30 days.

Demo job created on 11jobs for testing and demonstrations. It is not an actual opening at Skiffmill HQ.