Senior Backend Software Engineer

HavocAI is an unquestioned leader in collaborative autonomy, focusing on developing autonomous surface vessels for defense and commercial missions. They are seeking a Senior Backend Engineer to drive the development of scalable, high-performance backend systems that power their autonomous platforms, ensuring reliability, security, and performance.

Responsibilities:

• Drive execution and technical excellence across backend projects
• Set engineering standards, conduct code reviews, and guide architectural decisions
• Contribute to the backend roadmap and delivery planning in partnership with product and engineering leadership
• Foster a culture of ownership, quality, and continuous improvement
• Design, build, and maintain scalable, highly concurrent backend services in Go
• Architect distributed systems that support high throughput, reliability, and real-time operations
• Define service boundaries, APIs, and data models across systems
• Build services that support autonomy workflows, platform capabilities, and real-world deployments
• Optimize backend systems for performance, scalability, and resilience
• Identify and resolve bottlenecks in distributed systems and concurrency-heavy workloads
• Ensure systems meet high standards for uptime and operational reliability
• Improve maintainability, observability, and production readiness across backend services
• Partner with frontend, platform, autonomy, and embedded teams to integrate services across applications and devices
• Support end-to-end system design from edge devices to cloud infrastructure
• Contribute to system-level architecture across the stack
• Translate product and technical requirements into reliable backend systems
• Enforce secure development practices across backend systems
• Maintain high standards for code quality, testing, and documentation
• Participate in design reviews and help improve backend engineering practices
• Build systems with reliability, security, and maintainability in mind from the start

Requirements:

• 6+ years of experience in backend engineering, distributed systems engineering, or related software engineering roles
• Strong expertise in Go and building highly concurrent systems
• Experience designing and operating distributed systems at scale
• Strong API design and system architecture skills
• Experience with Kubernetes and containerized environments
• Deep understanding of performance optimization, data structures, networking, and system design
• Ability to drive projects from concept through production
• Strong communication, ownership, and cross-functional collaboration skills
• Experience in IoT, robotics, autonomy, or distributed hardware systems
• Strong networking fundamentals and debugging experience
• Experience with AWS or cloud-based infrastructure
• Familiarity with embedded systems or hardware integration
• Experience with observability, monitoring, and production operations
• Experience working in defense technology, robotics, maritime, or mission-critical software environments