Senior Backend Developer; Go​/Google Cloud

Position: Senior Backend Developer (Go / Google Cloud)
A client with Kforce is seeking a Senior Backend Developer (Go/Google Cloud) in New York, NY to help build and scale the services powering live event management, media processing, asset distribution, and hybrid edge-caching solutions.

Summary:

In this role, you will work on high-performance Go microservices, cloud-native architectures, and distributed systems that support mission-critical media workflows. This role requires strong backend engineering fundamentals, hands-on experience with Google Cloud Platform, Kubernetes, and event-driven architectures, and an interest in solving complex media and streaming challenges at scale.

What You'll Do:

* Senior Backend Developer will design, build, and maintain production Go microservices using gRPC, Protocol Buffers, and grpc-gateway

* Develop services supporting live event lifecycle management, media ingestion, asset export, media inspection, and distribution workflows

* Enhance our hybrid media-cache architecture that bridges on-premise file systems with Google Cloud Storage

* Own features end-to-end, from API design and protobuf schemas through deployment and operational support

* As a Senior Backend Developer, you will build event-driven solutions using Pub/Sub, Cloud Tasks, Cloud Functions, and Cloud Workflows

* Integrate with Google Cloud media services including Live Stream API, Transcoder API, Video Intelligence, and Vision AI

* Create and maintain unit, integration, load, and Critical User Journey (CUJ) tests

* Improve system reliability through observability, monitoring, and performance optimization

* Collaborate with Dev Ops teams on Kubernetes deployments, Helm charts, Terraform infrastructure, Istio service mesh configuration, and GKE rollouts
* 5+ years of professional backend development experience, including 3+ years building production services in Go

* Strong expertise with Go concurrency patterns, context-aware programming, error handling, graceful shutdown, and service reliability

* Experience designing and building APIs using gRPC, Protocol Buffers, grpc-gateway

* Hands-on experience building and operating applications on Google Cloud Platform, including GKE, Cloud Functions, Cloud Workflows, Pub/Sub, Cloud Tasks, Cloud Scheduler, Cloud Storage, Cloud SQL, Secret Manager, IAM, and Service Accounts

* Experience deploying and operating services in Kubernetes environments, including Helm, Terraform, workload scaling, resource tuning, health checks, logging, and troubleshooting

* Working knowledge of Istio service mesh concepts such as traffic routing, authorization policies, and mTLS is highly desirable

* Experience with query builders such as goqu, testing tools such as sqlmock, and caching technologies including Redis, Memory store, or in-memory caching solutions

* Strong SQL skills with MySQL and/or PostgreSQL, including schema design, indexing, migrations, and query optimization

* Experience building and deploying software through Git Hub Actions, Cloud Build, or similar CI/CD platforms

* Comfortable working in Infrastructure-as-Code environments using Terraform and Helm

* Familiarity with Artifact Registry, containerized deployments, and automated testing pipelines

* Strong testing discipline with unit, integration, end-to-end, and load testing

* Production experience with Open Telemetry, distributed tracing, Prometheus metrics, Grafana dashboards, Cloud Trace, and structured logging

Preferred:

* Live video and streaming technologies including SRT, RTMP, HLS, DASH, CMAF, manifest generation, and media delivery workflows

* Media processing technologies such as FFmpeg, FFprobe, H.264, H.265, and VP9