Senior Software Engineer - Cloud; Backend & Distributed Systems

About Vertex

Vertex is a high-growth enterprise software company powering real-time, cloud-native 3D applications for the world’s most advanced manufacturers. Our platform enables Fortune 500 industrial and defense‑adjacent organizations to deploy scalable, highly performant 3D‑enabled workflows in secure AWS environments, including Gov Cloud.

We operate at the intersection of cloud infrastructure, enterprise engineering systems, and mission‑critical deployments. As Vertex scales and expands into complex enterprise programs, operational excellence and deployment reliability are critical to our success.

Vertex is seeking a Senior Software Engineer – Cloud to design and evolve the core backend services powering our enterprise 3D collaboration platform.

You will:

• Architect and scale distributed cloud services that support mission‑critical enterprise deployments
• Lead scalable and optimized backend design decisions across APIs, data stores, messaging systems, and microservices
• Drive engineering quality, observability, and reliability standards
• Contribute to long‑term platform evolution, not just short‑term delivery

This role is ideal for an experienced backend engineer who thinks in systems, understands the trade‑offs of distributed architecture, and takes ownership of platform performance and reliability in production AWS environments.

• Reports to:
  
  VP of Product & Engineering

• Architect, design, and implement scalable backend services supporting high‑volume API consumers and enterprise workloads
• Lead evolution of our cloud‑native platform architecture across compute, storage, messaging, and observability layers
• Drive performance optimization across services, APIs, and data stores
• Ensure services are production‑grade, fault‑tolerant, and observable
• Contribute to infrastructure design decisions in partnership with Dev Ops and platform engineers
• Balance performance, cost, scalability, and maintainability in architectural decisions
• Establish and enforce strong testing practices, including automation and integration coverage
• Participate in technical design reviews and provide thoughtful, high‑quality code reviews
• Proactively identify architectural risks and propose durable solutions

• 5+ years of experience building SaaS products in cloud‑native, microservices‑based architectures
• Strong backend development experience in Scala, Java, or similar JVM‑based technologies
• Experience designing and operating distributed systems in production
• Hands‑on experience with AWS or Azure production environments
• Deep understanding of REST API design, performance optimization, and developer experience
• Experience working with containerized workloads (Docker)
• Strong understanding of data modeling, database interactions, and scalability patterns
• Experience managing mission‑critical or sensitive production systems
• Familiarity with observability best practices (metrics, logging, tracing)
• Strong architectural judgment and ability to reason about tradeoffs
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills in a remote environment
• Experience working remotely as part of a distributed team

• Background architecting enterprise B2B SaaS platforms
• Direct exposure to Gov Cloud or regulated environments (SOC2, FedRAMP, CMMC)
• Experience building distributed systems using Akka (actors, clustering, persistence, or streams)
• Familiarity with event‑driven systems and streaming architectures (e.g., Kafka / MSK, SNS/SQS)
• Proficiency with Infrastructure as Code (CDK / Cloud Formation)
• Demonstrated ability to optimize large‑scale API ecosystems
• Experience implementing frontend/full stack web applications leveraging modern frameworks and patterns
• Familiarity with 3D visualization, CAD, PLM, or industrial systems
• Experience improving developer experience for external API consumers
• Working knowledge of instrumentation and telemetry patterns targeting Datadog, New Relic, etc.

• AWS‑native architecture (Fargate, S3, MSK, RDS, Postgres, Redis, Elasticsearch)
• Infrastructure as Code (CDK / Cloud Formation)
• Containerized services (Docker)
• Observability via Datadog and Cloud Watch
• Backend…