Java Back end engineer - Remote

Job Title: Java Back End Engineer

Work location : Remote

Duration: 12 Months

• Bachelor's degree preferably in Computer Science, Information technology, Computer Engineering, or related IT discipline or equivalent experience with 7+ Minimum Experience

Required Experience

• 7+ years of hands-on experience in a professional software engineering role

Technical Expertise

Programming & Engineering Practices

• Proficiency in Java, Scala, and Python (at least one required; others preferred)
• Strong experience with test-driven development, including unit and integration testing
• Experience with code deployments and CI/CD pipelines (e.g., Spinnaker or similar tools)

Backend Systems & Data Stores

• Proficiency with databases and storage technologies such as:
• TiDB, RocksDB, MySQL
• Redis, Memcached
• Key-value stores

APIs & Service Development

• Solid understanding of Thrift and Protobuf schemas
• Experience building, maintaining, and evolving APIs
• Experience with web server and backend service development

Performance & Reliability

• Working knowledge of latency, throughput, and system performance
• Experience with load balancing and load testing
• Hands-on experience running performance tests and optimizing code to improve efficiency and scalability

Nice to Have

• Experience with data-centric application development
• Experience working with SQL, Hive, Presto/Trino, and Spark
• Familiarity with AI coding assistants such as Claude Code and GitHub Copilot

Example Projects & Areas of Impact

Pipeline Migration & Offline Systems

• Offline counterfactual scoring - support pipeline migration
• Search simulator - support pipeline migration
• Offline interaction detection - support pipeline migration

Search, Personalization & AI Systems

• Kendall:
• Incorporate user-facing metrics and features for new products (e.g., Hawaii tips, filters, personalization, AI Search)
• Support evaluation performance optimization
• Debug tooling for personalization and AI Search, including ranking and explanation systems

Monitoring, Metrics & Developer Experience

• Holdout:
• Implement comprehensive monitoring for traffic and models
• Side-by-side (SxS) metrics cleanup and UX improvements to improve developer velocity
• Example: cleaning up messy p2 carousel metrics
• Improving filter ranking visibility (amenity IDs vs amenity names)
• Set up alerting for new and existing applications using Grafana and PagerDuty

Platform Health & Maintenance

• Cleanup of:
• Old and deprecated code
• Retired experiments
• Deprecated trebuchets and legacy components