Senior Software Engineer

HackerRank helps thousands of companies like OpenAI, NVIDIA, Mercedes and Amazon hire developers based on their skills vs. pedigree, and also nurtures a community of millions of developers to upskill themselves to become next-gen developers.

The people at HackerRank care deeply about their work and have an extremely intense work ethic. In many companies, speed & quality is a tradeoff. At HackerRank, it’s not -- we expect you to ship in about half the time that most competent people think is possible while maintaining a standard of quality you’d proudly sign your name on. The only way to make this happen is if you truly love your craft and are deeply committed to growth.

About the role

As a Senior Software Engineer (Infra), you’ll own core backend services end to end and keep them fast, reliable, and cost-efficient at scale. You’ll design, build, and operate systems that power assessments, project workspaces, and content for millions of developers. Most work happens in Golang, running on Kubernetes across AWS and GCP, shipped through CI/CD with clear SLOs, strong observability, and safe rollouts. You’ll lead projects that reduce latency and incidents, improve unit costs, and simplify our platform, while partnering with other teams. You’ll join our on-call rotation with solid runbooks, mentor engineers, and set a high bar for design, code, and operations.

What you’ll do

• End-to-End Project Execution: Lead the design, development, and deployment of large and complex backend projects, ensuring timely and quality delivery.

• Technical Leadership: Play a key role in technical discussions, guiding the team through architectural decisions, troubleshooting, and performance optimization.

• Scalability & Performance: Build and maintain systems that can scale to meet the demands of high-traffic applications, with a focus on reliability and uptime.

• Containerization & Orchestration: Implement and manage containerized applications using Docker, Kubernetes, and other container technologies to ensure efficient resource utilization and deployment.

• Cloud Infrastructure: Utilize cloud services (AWS, GCP) to build and deploy infrastructure that supports our product needs, focusing on cost-efficiency, security, and scalability.

• Continuous Improvement: Drive best practices in coding, code reviews, and DevOps, while continuously seeking opportunities for system and process improvements.

• Mentorship: Provide guidance and mentorship to junior engineers, fostering a culture of learning and collaboration within the team.

• Stakeholder Collaboration: Work closely with cross-functional teams to understand business requirements and translate them into technical solutions that meet performance, quality, and availability standards.

Who you are

• Industry Experience: 3–6 years of experience in backend development, with a focus on building scalable, high-performance applications.

• Technical Proficiency: Strong expertise in backend development, preferably in Golang, Python or Java. Experience with containerization technologies such as Docker and Kubernetes is essential.

• Cloud Expertise: Solid experience with cloud platforms, specifically AWS and GCP, including services like SQS, Kinesis, Lambda, GKE, EKS, and others.

• Systems Knowledge: Deep understanding of operating systems, networking, distributed systems, and other relevant areas crucial for building and maintaining high-scale applications.

• Database Skills: Proficiency in database modeling, optimization, and query performance, preferably with relational databases.

• Problem-Solving: Ability to independently drive decisions and solve complex technical challenges.

• Team Player: Strong interpersonal skills, with the ability to build trust and rapport with internal and external stakeholders.

• DevOps Tools: Familiarity with CI/CD tools and workflows, and a willingness to explore new technologies and become a Subject-Matter Expert.

Even better if you have

• Multi-region or large event scaling experience.

• Observability depth: Prometheus/Grafana, OpenTelemetry tracing.

• Traffic shaping: canary, blue-green, feature flags.

• Data pipelines or queueing at scale; backpressure patterns.

• Migrations or provider swaps with zero/minimal downtime.

• Shipped an LLM/AI-backed feature with guardrails, rate limits, and cost/latency/error metrics.

You will thrive in this role if

• You like owning services from design to operations.

• You prefer simple, operable designs over clever ones.

• You measure before/after and aren’t afraid to rollback.

• You handle incidents calmly and fix root causes.

• You mentor others and raise the bar for the team.

Want to learn more about HackerRank? Check out HackerRank.com to explore our products, solutions and resources, and dive into our story and mission here.

HackerRank is a proud equal employment opportunity and affirmative action employer. We provide equal opportunity to everyone for employment based on individual performance and qualification. We never discriminate based on race, religion, national origin, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, age, marital, veteran, or disability status. All your information will be kept confidential according to EEO guidelines.

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