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Remote Backend Software Engineer jobs

17 open positions in the United States, newest first.

Backend software engineers build the server side of software products: the services, APIs, databases and background jobs that sit behind the user interface. They are responsible for the correctness, performance and reliability of that layer, and for the data model that the rest of the product depends on.

About the Backend Software Engineer role

What the work looks like

  • Design and implement REST, GraphQL or gRPC APIs consumed by web, mobile and partner clients.
  • Model data and write queries and migrations for relational databases such as PostgreSQL or MySQL.
  • Build asynchronous workers and event pipelines using queues or streaming systems such as Kafka.
  • Investigate production incidents using logs, metrics and traces, and fix the underlying causes.
  • Review teammates' pull requests and write design documents for larger changes to the service architecture.

What employers ask for

  • A server-side language such as Java, Go, Python or C#
  • SQL and relational database design
  • API design and distributed systems fundamentals
  • Cloud platforms such as AWS, GCP or Azure
  • Docker, CI/CD and automated testing
  • Observability, caching and performance tuning

Doing this job remotely

Backend work is among the easiest engineering work to do remotely, since code review, design documents and deployment pipelines are already asynchronous. The main constraint is on-call: most teams share a rotation for production incidents that can include nights and weekends. Employers usually ask for some overlap with a core time zone.

Where it comes from and where it leads

Entry is typically through a computer science degree, a bootcamp, or a move from full-stack development. Progression runs to senior, staff and principal engineer, or toward engineering management, platform engineering and architecture.