Senior Backend Engineer

Who You Are

Surfe helps sales teams find and enrich company and contact data and bring it into their CRM. We are hiring a Senior Backend Engineer to build and scale the systems behind gathering, cleaning, enriching and serving that data.

This is a hands-on senior individual contributor role. You will design, code, ship, operate and improve production systems, with ownership of technical decisions and outcomes.

What you will do

• Build resilient distributed backend services and data-processing pipelines, balancing latency, throughput, reliability and cost.
• Develop integrations and asynchronous architectures using queues, background workers and idempotent processing.
• Own production reliability through instrumentation, performance tuning, incident analysis and systematic improvements.
• Use coding agents across planning, implementation, testing, review and debugging. Break work into reviewable pieces, validate generated output and remain accountable for correctness and production results.
• Improve API design, testing, CI/CD and safe deployments.
• Collaborate with Product and engineers on priorities, success metrics, design reviews and technical direction.

What you bring

• Senior-level experience building and operating production backend systems. We value demonstrated ownership, decisions and outcomes rather than a fixed number of years.
• Strong backend programming skills. We use Go; deep Java/JVM experience or comparable backend expertise is welcome if you can demonstrate strong fundamentals and the ability to ramp up in Go.
• Experience diagnosing and resolving production scaling constraints, with concrete examples of your personal contribution.
• Practical coding-agent workflows, including critical review, testing and recovery when generated code is wrong.
• Distributed-systems fundamentals: concurrency, backpressure, retries, idempotency, consistency trade-offs and failure modes.
• Cloud, container and operational experience. AWS, Kubernetes and Docker are relevant to our environment; transferable experience matters.
• Database fundamentals, including schema design, indexing and query tuning. PostgreSQL and familiarity with search or other data stores are useful.
• Engineering rigor in testing, observability, CI/CD and safe rollouts.
• Clear communication, collaborative problem-solving and comfort owning work in a small team.

Helpful experience

• Scaling through company growth, including Series C/D or comparable production complexity.
• Queueing and streaming systems such as Kafka, SQS, SNS, Kinesis, RabbitMQ or Pub/Sub.
• Datadog, OpenTelemetry, OpenSearch, Redis, MongoDB, vector databases or retrieval patterns.
• Infrastructure as code and backend security practices.
• SalesTech or CRM integrations. Domain experience is helpful, not required.

What success looks like

• Reliable data services with higher throughput and lower latency as usage grows.
• Better observability, alerts and incident resolution.
• Repeatable patterns for asynchronous processing, testing and safe deployments.
• Faster delivery using coding agents without compromising correctness or maintainability.
• A team that improves through your collaboration and technical leadership.

Our Process

We want to be mindful of your time while finding the right candidate for our team. No homework to do, only human interactions! Our typical process includes:

• Screening call with Talent Acquisition (30 minutes): learn more about you and the role.
• Technical fit call with CTO (30 minutes): explore your technical depth.
• Virtual Onsite: Coding Session (1 hour), pairing with engineers on a real-world problem, focusing on clean logic, maintainability and edge cases.
• Virtual Onsite: System Design Interview (1 hour), exploring scalable architectures, technical trade-offs and balancing performance with simplicity.
• Virtual Onsite: Culture and Values Interview (30 minutes), exploring our values and your working style.
• Virtual Onsite: Manager Interview (30 minutes), discussing your career, project ownership and growth.

If all goes well, we will then make you an offer!

What we offer

• Annual compensation range of US$50,000–US$250,000. The applicable package depends on location, experience and contract type; we will clarify compensation and equity early in the process.
• Challenging work and ownership in a diverse team.
• A healthy work environment with few meetings and low-touch management.
• Remote opportunities across Europe, the US, Canada and Latin America, subject to supported employment arrangements and agreed collaboration hours with our Europe-based team.
• Stipend to set up your home office.
• Yearly team events in Paris and offsite.
• Health insurance and other benefits applicable to your place of residence, for employment in France or elsewhere via Deel Employer of Record.
• Possibility to work as a freelancer.