Senior Backend Engineer — AI-Driven, Production‑Grade Systems

Description

Why Gravitate?

At Gravitate, we’re on a mission to put everyday supply and logistics decisions in motion, powered by innovative problem-solving from industry experts.

A lot of companies say it. We mean it:
Gravitate is different. Rooted in the spirit of collaboration, we thrive on the smarts of our people and the dynamic we’ve cultivated.

Tell Me About My Job:

If you are considering this role, you are someone who has stopped waiting to be handed well-defined work. You take a large, ambiguous problem, break it into a plan, and drive it to production — unblocking yourself and the people around you along the way.

You’ll own a significant area of Gravitate’s fuel logistics platform — or a full service — and be accountable for its reliability, performance, and evolution over time. That means leading design for complex features, evaluating real trade-offs between performance, maintainability, and cost, and documenting the decisions so the next engineer understands them.

You’ll go deep on the backend:
Python services and APIs, data modeling in MongoDB, async and event-driven processing, running on Kubernetes in GCP and Azure. You’ll also be one of the people we count on when something breaks in production — finding root cause quickly, driving recovery, and then driving the monitoring, observability, and performance improvements that keep it from happening again.

Seniority here isn’t just scope of code — it’s scope of influence. You’ll mentor our mid-level engineers, raise the bar in code and design review, and lead technical initiatives without needing formal authority to do it.

We’re strongly against artificial separations of responsibility and throwing work “over the wall.” As a senior engineer here, you’re part of the product team — in the room for the product conversation, not downstream of it.

You’re an Ideal Candidate If:

• You deliver large things, accurately. You take a big feature with real unknowns, break it into a plan, estimate it honestly, and land it. When it slips, you raise the risk early instead of hoping.
• You design before you build. You can hold performance, maintainability, and cost in your head at the same time, pick a direction, and explain why. You design for the change that’s coming, not just the ticket in front of you.
• You own your work in production. You’re the person who gets to root cause fast on a hard issue, and who cares about the dashboards, alerts, and query plans in your area — not just the feature that shipped.
• You make the engineers around you better. Your code review comments teach something. Mid-level engineers seek you out. You lead initiatives because people follow you, not because you were assigned.
• You have strong opinions and hold them honestly. You argue for the best solution, not necessarily your own, and you can explain a complex technical trade-off to someone who doesn’t write code.
• You know the business, not just the codebase. You understand your product area deeply enough to push back on a product decision — and to make a better one.
• You want to work in an AI-enabled workflow. You see the impact of AI on code generation and are willing and able to see how it can make you more productive. You want to help in building the harness around it so that the team can get more done.

Duties/Responsibilities:

• Drive delivery of large backend features end-to-end — breaking large projects into manageable plans, estimating work with moderate unknowns accurately, and raising risks early
• Lead technical design for complex features; evaluate trade-offs across performance, maintainability, and cost; document decisions; design for extensibility
• Own a significant area of the product or a full service — accountable for its reliability, performance, and evolution
• Build and…