Top Backend Engineer Jobs in Chicago, IL

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.

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.

Drive technical strategy and roadmap for Affirm's Online Storage platform. Design and build multi-region, highly available datastore solutions and control planes for hundreds of databases. Automate schema migrations, disaster recovery, sharding, and performance tuning. Collaborate with product, SRE, and infrastructure teams, own operations and on-call readiness, and mentor engineers while setting code and design standards.

Lead and set technical strategy for the Order Platform powering post-checkout flows (orders, captures, refunds, settlement). Design and ship highly available backend systems, own reliability/operational practices, mentor engineers, collaborate cross-functionally, and drive long-term technical decisions and execution plans.

Develop and maintain scalable Java backend systems using Spring Boot and microservices architecture. Collaborate with customer teams, review specifications, write clean code, participate in code reviews, document solutions, and troubleshoot and optimize backend performance, reliability, and security. The role also contributes technical expertise to training next-generation AI systems, though prior AI experience is not required.

Build and maintain Go-based backend services and APIs on AWS for agentic AI workflows, including metadata suggestions, automated ownership reassignment, system deprecation, and agent/MCP inventory. Design database schemas and queries in PostgreSQL and MongoDB, integrate asset discovery tooling, map dependencies and user journeys, and refactor legacy code safely. Deliver tested features through Agile/Scrum while collaborating with program and customer teams.

Own and operate the data plane: develop Envoy/WASM filters for deep packet inspection, deploy and manage EKS workloads with Helm/GitOps and CI/CD, integrate Redis sidecars, provide observability (Prometheus/Grafana/OpenTelemetry), ensure reliable audit log streaming, and author ADRs as the data plane evolves.

Design and build scalable backend systems, data pipelines, and cloud infrastructure. Own CI/CD, containerization, databases, and reliability; collaborate with tech leads to deliver secure, production-grade solutions for startups in a fully remote environment.

As a Senior Software Engineer, you'll own backend systems, mentor team members, and collaborate with product and design to build user-focused solutions.

Build, operate, and scale backend systems for card issuing and transaction processing. Break down projects, collaborate with product and cross-functional teams, write tested extensible code, support monitoring and on-call operations, and participate in team growth activities including interviews.

Lead ONDC integration by designing and implementing backend services and APIs. Ensure compliance with ONDC/Beckn standards, handle data modeling, performance tuning, API security, and transaction flows. Integrate logistics, payments, and catalog systems, write tests, conduct code reviews, and maintain high availability for ONDC services.

The Back-end Engineer will develop and maintain services and APIs, design data models, and contribute to system stability, collaborating with other engineers and product managers.

Develop, scale, and maintain core backend APIs within a TypeScript/NestJS monolith for supply chain modules (OMS, WMS, MES). Implement secure payment and logistics integrations, caching with Redis, async/event-driven workflows, and observability (OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Loki). Support AI agent orchestration and ensure transactional integrity using PostgreSQL.

Design and scale platform infrastructure, backend services, developer tooling, CI/CD pipelines, and secure cloud-native systems. Improve developer experience, reliability, observability, and incident response while establishing security and compliance controls. Partner with engineering and product leaders to shape architecture and platform strategy, mentor engineers, and support customer-facing logistics projects. The role uses Python, AWS, Terraform, containers, orchestration, event-driven architectures, and relational databases.

Leads enterprise quality engineering and test automation strategy across UI, API, integration, performance, and data layers. Architects Java-based automation frameworks, integrates quality gates into CI/CD pipelines, and drives AI/LLM adoption for test generation, debugging, self-healing, test data creation, and defect analysis. Establishes ETL and data validation practices, governs DevOps quality standards, mentors QA teams, and collaborates with Engineering, DevOps, Data Engineering, and Product stakeholders to improve quality maturity and delivery predictability.

Senior backend engineer responsible for designing and implementing new features, scaling and optimizing the platform, improving Postgres and Elasticsearch performance, fine-tuning LLMs, and making architectural decisions. Collaborate with engineering team, take ownership of features, write performant, maintainable code, and help shape product and infrastructure for data-intensive applications (NLP, search, indexing).

Lead design, implementation, and maintenance of scalable backend systems and services. Improve performance, reliability, and deployments; operate production systems (incident response rotation); conduct code reviews; mentor engineers; collaborate with product, sales, and customers.

Own and extend an Elixir and Phoenix backend powering a building configurator, pricing engine, structural calculations, and internal tools. Implement numerically complex business logic, background processing, database functionality, third-party integrations, authentication, testing, CI/CD, code reviews, and releases. Work independently while communicating decisions and progress clearly with the backend lead and front-end developer.

Audit backend services, APIs, databases, queues, and data flows for scalability and reliability issues. Identify bottlenecks, document findings, and implement production fixes including code refactoring, schema redesign, caching, indexing, query optimization, and service restructuring. Partner with engineers through pairing, reviews, and handoffs. Conduct performance and load testing while improving system latency, resilience, and infrastructure efficiency.

Develop and maintain backend services and RESTful APIs using C# and .NET. Design and optimize MySQL schemas and queries, troubleshoot production and staging issues, improve performance and scalability, document architecture, and uphold code quality and security. Collaborate with cross-functional teams in a fully remote environment while contributing to development best practices and continuous improvement.