Senior Backend Engineer

About Sierra Studio

When you apply to Sierra, you join an ecosystem. We specialize in connecting talented Brazilian professionals with exciting career opportunities in a highly-vetted small community of growing companies in the US. Applying to Sierra seamlessly integrates you into this ecosystem, granting automatic eligibility for all relevant opportunities we offer.

Our hiring partner is a platform that simplifies third-party insurance compliance management with smart tools and expert guidance. They help proactively identify and address coverage gaps, automate tracking and notifications, and collaborate with partners across the construction industry.

As a Senior Engineer, you will focus on back-end software infrastructure development and dev-ops support. You will work alongside a team of engineers to take a new AI enabled software product to market in the insurance compliance space. You will work cross-functionally with product managers, designers, and stakeholders to architect, plan and develop. As part of a new and growing team within an existing organization, you will be instrumental in shaping the engineering culture surrounding this new product offering.

• Own back-end feature development – Participate in the entire product lifecycle from initial idea to launch, ensuring a cohesive flow from backend to frontend.

• Own platform stability and maintenance – Manage the deployment lifecycle of new features and fixes, ensure the platform is stable, scalable, and has good observability.

• Craft high-quality code – Produce clear and efficient code, actively engage in code reviews, and champion technological excellence.

• Write tech specs – Translate business needs into creative and technically robust solutions.

• Engage with cross-functional partners – Collaborate closely with design, product and stakeholders to drive the success of the project.

• Document thoroughly – Create comprehensive technical documentation, simplifying the onboarding process for newcomers.

• Refine best practices – Proactively seek and implement improvements in engineering and organizational workflows.

• Drive engineering planning and processes – Participate in sprint planning, effort estimation, capacity planning, and release management.

• Architect and evolve the overall stack – Guide technology decisions and stack improvements; anticipate scaling challenges.

• 5+ years of experience in software engineering, with at least 2 years in a senior role

• Backend experience: Python, FastAPI and SQLAlchemy

• Experience implementing event driven systems using message queues like Google Pub/Sub, Kafka etc.

• Experience with relational databases (e.g. PostgreSQL, MySQL, etc)

• Experience implementing cloud infrastructure:

  • Deploying serverless and service oriented architecture

  • Implementing horizontal and vertical scaling patterns

  • Owning monitoring and observability

  • Alerting and cost tracking

• Experience with Google Cloud Platform products

  • Cloud Run

  • Pub/Sub

  • GCE

  • Cloud Tasks

  • BigTable

• Familiarity with CI/CD tools, especially Github Actions

• Growth mindset: able to quickly learn new languages, frameworks, and more

• Strong written and verbal communicator in English

• Bonus skills:

  • Familiarity with document processing and OCR tools

  • Experience using AI tools for accelerated development (e.g. Cursor or PyCharm AI Assistant)

We seek a self-motivated individual with a proactive attitude. We try to keep our egos out of the workplace, so we are looking for someone who values learning and doesn’t mind being wrong. Given our fast-paced and dynamic environment, excellent upfront communication skills are a must for this role. The ideal candidate should possess the drive to complete tasks with minimal supervision and be able to articulate technical concepts clearly.