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.

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