The role
Wilkes & Liberty needs a Senior Backend Engineer who can turn operating rules into explicit software boundaries. You will build services and integrations that remain correct under retries, partial failure, untrusted input, changing dependencies, and the handoff from our delivery team to the client's operators.
What you will own
- Shape domain models, service boundaries, API contracts, data flows, and integration patterns from the client's actual operating rules.
- Implement and maintain service endpoints, asynchronous jobs, webhooks, scheduled work, and external-system integrations with explicit ownership and failure behavior.
- Design authentication, authorization, validation, idempotency, rate limits, audit trails, and data-handling controls at the boundary where authority belongs.
- Protect data integrity through schemas, constraints, migrations, retention rules, transactional decisions, and recovery paths that can be tested.
- Instrument latency, errors, queues, dependencies, and business-critical outcomes so operators can detect and diagnose failures.
- Build automated unit, integration, contract, and failure-path coverage, then tie release evidence to the exact code and environment tested.
- Document APIs, data contracts, decisions, known limits, and operational procedures so another team can run and change the service safely.
- Work directly with client stakeholders when a forward-deployed assignment requires discovery, implementation, and handoff by the same engineer.
What you bring
- You have shipped production APIs, services, or integrations in at least one mature server-side stack and can work effectively in the TypeScript/Node and PHP systems common to our portfolio.
- You can reason about authorization, concurrency, retries, ordering, consistency, caching, queues, and partial failure instead of treating them as infrastructure details.
- You write clear contracts for data and behavior, including what happens when inputs are invalid, dependencies are unavailable, or a request is repeated.
- You understand relational data modeling, migrations, observability, and privacy-aware handling across the full lifecycle of stored and transmitted data.
- You can distinguish application responsibilities from frontend, content-platform, data-pipeline, identity, and infrastructure responsibilities.
- You communicate effectively with client operators and cross-functional delivery teams and leave decisions discoverable in code and documentation.
Helpful experience
- TypeScript/Node.js, PHP, Python, REST, GraphQL, PostgreSQL, Redis, message queues, and containerized services.
- OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, Keycloak or comparable identity systems, and service-to-service authorization.
- Drupal or other content-platform integrations, search services, secure file processing, notification systems, and operational automation.
- Ledger or payment integrations where custody, signing, settlement, or regulated boundaries receive separate specialist review rather than casual implementation.
Equal opportunity and accommodations. Wilkes & Liberty considers qualified candidates without regard to protected characteristics. Reasonable accommodations are available during the application process.