Top Backend Engineer Jobs in Chicago, IL

Lead and deliver quarterly goals for a backend team; guide engineers through ambiguous problems; collaborate with product, design, and analytics; identify and resolve project and technical issues; ensure operational availability and on-call readiness; set code and design quality standards; and mentor and develop team members.

Design, build, and operate backend systems for prediction markets, including order management, trade matching, settlement, and market resolution. Architect distributed, low-latency systems with strict financial correctness, lead multi-quarter technical projects, mentor engineers, and collaborate with Product, Compliance, and Risk to meet regulatory requirements.

Develop a platform for liquidity and loan collateralization. Responsibilities include building and integrating data pipelines, creating user experiences, and collaborating with teams for system design.

Leads backend architecture and hands-on development for a government licensing and regulatory platform on Google Cloud. Designs Java and Spring Boot microservices, PostgreSQL persistence, event-driven workflows, integrations, payment flows, security, and compliance capabilities. Establishes testing, code review, and CI/CD standards; mentors engineers; coordinates with client technical leads and stakeholders; decomposes work and reports delivery status. The role requires ownership from system design through production operation and integration with state and federal systems.

Build and deliver Java 21 and Spring Boot microservices on Google Cloud for a government licensing and regulatory platform. Responsibilities include PostgreSQL or AlloyDB persistence, event-driven workflows, scheduled processing, secure REST/SOAP/SFTP/webhook integrations, payment and reconciliation flows, compliance controls, automated testing, code reviews, and CI/CD deployment.

Lead technical strategy and delivery for backend marketplace/search systems. Collaborate with PM, design, and analytics; own operational reliability, monitoring, on-call, testing, and runbooks; set code/design standards; drive major feature delivery and deprecations; mentor and develop engineering talent.

Design, implement, and optimize high-performance backend systems in Rust for an xOT security platform. Participate across the development lifecycle—debugging, testing, and performance tuning—while integrating relational and NoSQL data stores, microservices, third-party devices, and AI tools. Provide technical leadership, code review feedback, and promote secure, reliable, observable distributed systems.

Design, build, and maintain backend services powering Clerkie's platform. Improve reliability, performance, scalability, observability, and support feature development. Participate in technical design, cross-functional collaboration, documentation, and own projects end-to-end in a fast-moving startup environment.

Lead backend and full-stack work on the Payments team, building multi-gateway integrations (Stripe, PayPal), payment APIs, and customer payment UIs. Ensure secure, compliant (PCI-DSS) payment flows, reliability, observability, and scalability across AWS/Kubernetes microservices. Partner cross-functionally to design architecture, implement settlement/reconciliation, and maintain high availability.

Lead a portfolio of backend engineering projects and a development team to design, build, and operate distributed microservices and cloud-native solutions (Java, Go, Python). Mentor engineers, collaborate with product managers, ensure regulatory-compliant systems, and occasionally code or evaluate implementations.

Design, implement, and evolve complex backend features and architecture. Improve reliability, performance, and security at scale. Mentor engineers, participate in incident response, set backend standards, and integrate agentic AI into production workflows.

Lead technical strategy and execution for a backend ledger team building highly available, audit-grade financial systems. Drive architecture, reliability, monitoring, on-call practices, code quality, cross-functional collaboration, and mentoring to ensure accurate, scalable ledger operations.

Provides technical leadership and delivery ownership for engineers building scalable AWS cloud-native applications. Leads architecture and solution design across Java, Spring Boot microservices, OpenSearch, CI/CD, observability, and AWS infrastructure. Drives modernization, scalability, security, reliability, DevOps automation, incident resolution, and continuous improvement while mentoring engineers and collaborating with product, architecture, platform, and business stakeholders.

Design and implement backend and real-time features in the GitLab monolith for portfolio planning at scale. Optimize PostgreSQL performance, evolve APIs (GraphQL/REST), build capacity planning and work-item hierarchies, create proofs of concept, maintain automated tests, support safe rollouts with feature flags and observability, mentor contributors, and participate in on-call and production troubleshooting.

As a Staff Backend Engineer, you'll design and operate backend services, lead technical initiatives, ensure reliability, and mentor team members in a remote-first setup.

Design, build, test, deploy, and support scalable backend applications across the full software development lifecycle. Collaborate with product, UX, nutrition, vendors, and business stakeholders to define solutions and interfaces. Solve complex architectural problems, refactor code, mentor engineers, communicate technical direction, and develop distributed systems using cloud, big-data, and backend technologies.

Develop, maintain, and optimize mission-critical backend APIs and scalable cloud services for web and mobile clients. Implement secure, high-performance systems, automated tests, observability, and technical documentation. Mentor peers, follow best practices, and support a proof-of-concept launch and fundraising activities as a volunteer contributor.

Build and operate high-throughput backend services powering AI agent orchestration, connector integrations, and real-time data pipelines. Design scalable core platform services, collaborate with ML, frontend, and product teams, implement infrastructure-as-code and CI/CD, and mentor junior engineers to deliver reliable, AI-powered features.

As a Staff Engineer for Revenue, you'll shape technical vision and architecture for billing and pricing systems, ensuring correctness while enhancing cross-team collaboration.

As a Software Engineer, you'll design, build, and maintain IAM solutions, ensuring security and reliability while working with cloud computing standards.

Designs and scales high-performance backend web services and ETL pipelines supporting tens of thousands of transactions per second. Responsibilities include architecting fault-tolerant distributed systems, improving performance, developing monitoring and deployment strategies, collaborating across product and engineering teams, and supporting recruiting and onboarding. The role requires expertise in data-intensive systems, microservices, cloud architectures, and commercial SaaS products.

Build and operate scalable, multi-tenant backend services for Grafana’s SaaS application platform. Responsibilities include developing features, improving production operations, authoring and reviewing designs, shaping the roadmap, mentoring engineers, collaborating across teams, and participating in on-call rotations. The role requires distributed-systems experience, strong communication, customer ownership, pragmatic decision-making, and familiarity with or willingness to learn Golang.

Senior backend engineer responsible for setting technical direction, designing scalable distributed systems, building customer-facing web applications, mentoring engineers, and applying machine learning to large-scale healthcare data. The role requires Java, Scala, or Rust expertise, cloud systems experience, technical design leadership, cross-functional collaboration, and adoption of agentic engineering practices.

Build and ship backend systems and robust architectures for SMB and enterprise restaurant customers. Drive end-to-end development including planning, CI/CD, and productionization. Collaborate on product roadmap, iterate from user feedback, and contribute to team culture and growth.

Design, build, and optimize scalable backend services, APIs, and data pipelines. Integrate with third-party billing/commerce systems, maintain serverless/event-driven architectures on AWS, ensure security and performance, implement automated tests and CI/CD, mentor engineers, and drive architectural decisions.