Backend Engineer Job Description
A complete backend engineer job description template, plus the ATS keywords hiring teams screen for and how far "backend" scope varies by company size.
At a five-person startup, "Backend Engineer" often means you own everything server-side: the API, the database, the deployment pipeline, and whatever infrastructure keeps it all running. At a company with a dedicated platform or infrastructure team, the same title can mean a much narrower job — writing application logic behind an API contract someone else built the plumbing for. The posting rarely states which one it is; the org chart, if you can see it, tells you faster than the job description does.
A backend interview loop in 2026 spends less time on algorithmic puzzles than it used to, and more on how a candidate reasons about a system under real conditions: what happens to this endpoint when the database it depends on is slow, how they'd design a schema knowing the access patterns will change, what they'd do differently if a job has to be safe to run twice. Candidates who over-prepared on algorithm practice sites and under-prepared on "what happens when this breaks" tend to stall here.
SQL fluency is a strange case in backend postings. It's frequently filed under "nice to have" even though, in practice, it's some of the most load-bearing daily work on the team — reading a slow query plan, knowing when an index will actually help, deciding whether a join belongs in the database or the application. Treat a "SQL: nice to have" line skeptically until you've asked how the team actually spends its time.
Verrantine · Denver, CO
Full-time · Hybrid
$125,000 – $170,000
About the role
Verrantine is hiring a Backend Engineer for the core services team, which owns the APIs behind billing, entitlements and account data — the systems the rest of the product calls to find out what a customer is allowed to do. You'll work primarily in Java and PostgreSQL, with Kafka for the events other services subscribe to.
This team sits upstream of almost everything else engineering builds, so correctness and backward compatibility matter more here than on a typical feature team. We're a hybrid team based out of Denver, in the office two days a week, and looking for someone comfortable being the service other teams depend on rather than the one shipping the most visible feature.
What you'll do
- Design and build APIs that other engineering teams — and in some cases external partners — integrate against directly.
- Own schema design and migrations for the services on your team, including the tradeoffs a bad migration can cause.
- Investigate and fix production incidents in services your team owns, as part of an on-call rotation roughly one week in six.
- Write automated tests that cover the failure paths, not only the happy path.
- Review pull requests from teammates, with particular attention to backward compatibility on shared APIs.
- Instrument the services you build so a production problem is diagnosable from logs and metrics, not guesswork.
- Work with the teams consuming your APIs to design contracts before either side writes code.
- Improve query performance and data model decisions in services you inherit, not only ones you built.
What we're looking for
- Three or more years writing backend services that ran in production with real traffic.
- Strong working knowledge of Java or a comparable statically typed backend language.
- Practical SQL and relational database design — you can design a schema, not only query one.
- Experience with message queues or event streaming, such as Kafka, in a production system.
- Comfort with version control, code review and continuous integration as daily practice.
- The ability to reason about a system's failure modes, not only its happy path.
Nice to have
- Experience with Kubernetes or another container orchestration platform in production.
- Familiarity with gRPC in addition to REST, for internal service-to-service calls.
- Exposure to infrastructure as code, such as Terraform.
- Experience implementing encryption at rest in a way that supports customer-managed keys for enterprise customers.
- Prior work on a billing, payments or entitlements system specifically.
- Experience mentoring less experienced engineers.
Benefits
- Medical, dental and vision coverage, with employee premiums covered in full.
- 401(k) with a 4% company match, vested immediately.
- Hybrid schedule: two days a week in the Denver office.
- $2,000 annual learning budget, usable on conferences, courses or books.
- Twenty days of paid time off plus company holidays.
Salary range
As posted for this sample role. Real pay varies by employer, location and experience.
$125,000–$170,000/ yr
ATS keywords for this role
The applicant tracking system (ATS) — the recruiting software a hiring team searches and filters applicants with — will screen for these. Weight shows how central each one is to this specific posting.
Required and central (4)
Important (6)
Mentioned in passing (10)
Frequently asked questions
What's the difference between a Backend Engineer and a DevOps or Site Reliability Engineer?
At companies large enough to have both, a Backend Engineer builds the application logic and data model behind a service, while DevOps or SRE builds and maintains the infrastructure and deployment systems that service runs on. At smaller companies, one person often does both, and the title tells you less than the team's headcount does. If infrastructure ownership matters to you, ask directly rather than inferring it from the title.
Do backend engineers need cloud infrastructure experience?
Usually some, rarely deep expertise, unless the posting is at a company without a separate platform team. Knowing how to deploy and debug your own service on a cloud provider is common; designing the underlying network and account architecture is a different, more specialized job that a posting will usually call out separately.
Is a computer science degree necessary for backend roles?
Less than it used to be, but more than for some other engineering roles, particularly at companies that lean on formal systems or database coursework. It's commonly listed as preferred rather than required. Demonstrated experience with the problems above — schema design, failure handling, distributed data — tends to matter more in the actual interview than the degree does.
How much SQL do I really need to know?
More than the posting usually signals. If the role touches a relational database at all — and most backend roles do — expect at least one interview question that requires writing or reading a non-trivial query, and possibly a discussion of index behavior. "SQL: nice to have" is one of the more unreliable lines in this kind of posting.
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