Job Description:
Senior Backend Engineer
Hybrid On-Site Dearborn MI
$55-75/HR
Position Description
The Senior Backend Engineer will be responsible for designing, building, and operating high-throughput backend systems that ingest, process, and serve large volumes of telematics data from connected vehicle fleets.
This role sits at the intersection of distributed systems, data engineering, and API development, delivering reliable, low-latency services that power fleet intelligence products for commercial and enterprise customers.
Key Responsibilities
- Design and develop scalable, high-performance backend services and APIs that process and expose telematics data, including:
- GPS data
- Trip events
- Driver behavior
- Vehicle diagnostics
- Sensor telemetry
- Build and maintain real-time and batch data pipelines that ingest high-volume vehicle event streams from messaging systems such as Pub/Sub and Kafka.
- Process and transform data for use within data warehouses and operational data stores.
- Design cloud-native solutions leveraging GCP services and distributed data-processing technologies.
- Develop and maintain RESTful and/or gRPC APIs that support integrations between applications and backend microservices.
- Support scalable data warehouse architectures and data models for downstream analytics.
- Develop or integrate AI/ML models and rule-based expert systems where applicable.
Required Skills
Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
- Experience deploying and managing services on Google Cloud Platform, including:
- Compute Engine
- Cloud Storage
- IAM
- Cloud Functions
- Experience designing and implementing cloud-native application architectures using technologies such as:
- Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE)
- Cloud SQL
- Pub/Sub
Big Data
- Experience working with large-scale data-processing frameworks and technologies, including:
- Apache Spark
- Dataflow
- BigQuery
- Experience building ETL pipelines capable of processing large volumes of event data and transforming it for downstream analytics.
Data Warehousing
- Experience designing and maintaining data warehouse solutions such as:
- BigQuery
- Snowflake
- Redshift
- Experience with data modeling and warehouse architecture, including solutions such as star schemas used for analytics and reporting.
Artificial Intelligence & Expert Systems
- Experience developing or integrating AI/ML models and rule-based expert systems.
- Experience with technologies such as Vertex AI for model development and implementation.
- Experience implementing automated decision-making or rule-engine solutions.
API Development
- Experience designing, building, and consuming RESTful and/or gRPC APIs.
- Experience with API authentication and security, including OAuth 2.0.
- Experience designing versioned APIs that integrate applications with backend microservices.
Required Experience
- 7+ years of IT experience
- 5+ years of software development experience
- Senior-level engineering experience
- Practical experience in at least two programming languages, or advanced expertise in one programming language
- Experience providing technical guidance and contributing to engineering best practices
Preferred Technical Experience
Languages
- Kotlin
- Java
- Python
- Equivalent JVM/backend programming languages
Frameworks & APIs
- Spring Boot
- gRPC
- REST API design
Data Technologies
- BigQuery
- PostgreSQL
- Redis
- Bigtable
- Kafka
- Pub/Sub
Cloud & Infrastructure
- Google Cloud Platform or equivalent cloud platform
- Docker
- Kubernetes
- CI/CD pipelines
Engineering Practices
- Test-Driven Development (TDD)
- MLOps-adjacent data pipeline patterns
- Database performance tuning
- API versioning
Preferred GCP Experience
Familiarity with advanced Google Cloud Platform services beyond core compute and storage, including:
- Vertex AI
- Dataflow
- Cloud Composer / Apache Airflow
- BigQuery ML
Experience using technologies such as Cloud Composer to orchestrate scheduled data pipelines feeding into a BigQuery data warehouse is preferred.
Education Required
