Member of Technical Staff, Backend

About the role

Highlight is building a shared intelligence layer for modern workforces. As a Member of Technical Staff, Backend you will own critical backend infrastructure that powers team management, permissions, LLM efficiency, and integration‑driven workflows, delivering high performance and reliability.

Key responsibilities

• Design and build multi‑tenant backend foundations, permissions systems, and internal/admin tooling.
• Develop and operate asynchronous processing pipelines for background workloads and workflow orchestration.
• Improve system performance and cost through caching, batching, and efficient data‑access patterns.
• Create secure, extensible integration infrastructure including authentication, APIs, and third‑party connectors.
• Raise backend engineering quality via observability, testing, incident readiness, and operational best practices.
• Collaborate cross‑functionally to ship end‑to‑end features while ensuring durability and extensibility.

Required profile

• 5+ years building production backend systems in fast‑moving startups.
• Ownership mindset: comfortable handling architecture, implementation, deployment, monitoring, and debugging.
• Experience with reliable distributed systems (APIs, databases, async jobs, queues, pipelines).
• Background in real‑time systems (WebSockets, pub/sub, event fan‑out) at scale.
• Familiarity with enterprise‑grade multi‑tenant architectures, team management, and role/permission models.
• Data‑driven orientation with ability to measure impact of engineering work.

Required skills

• APIs
• Databases
• Asynchronous processing
• Queues and pipelines
• WebSockets
• Pub/Sub and event fan‑out
• Caching and batching
• Authentication and third‑party connectors
• Observability and monitoring
• Testing and incident readiness
• Debugging
• LLM infrastructure patterns (caching, batching, evals, integrations)