Engineering & Delivery
Senior Backend Engineer
Build secure APIs, services, integrations, and domain models that connect content, identity, data, and operational systems without hiding critical boundaries.
- Location
- United States — remote
- Work schedule
- Full-time
- Engagement
- Contract (1099)
- Appointment term
- Ongoing
- Seniority
- Senior
- Department
- Engineering & Delivery
- Remote policy
- Remote
- Hiring status
- Open
- Applications close
- October 31, 2026
- Eligible work jurisdictions
- United States
- Work eligibility
- Authorized to work in the U.S.; no sponsorship available
- Clearance requirement
- Must be eligible to obtain
- Clearance level
- No clearance required
- Expected travel
- 0%
- Veteran friendly
- Yes
The role
Build services that preserve the client's operating rules through retries, partial failures and changing dependencies. At Wilkes & Liberty, you will define clear software boundaries and leave the APIs, evidence and procedures another team needs to operate them.
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.