Top Remote Backend Engineer Jobs in Chicago, IL

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.

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.

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.

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.

Design and implement secure, scalable backend services for voice agents, integrate AI models and telephony, improve inference, debug concurrent systems, and collaborate with Product to deliver features end-to-end.

Lead technical direction and architecture for DAP Repository Flows, design and ship autonomous and scheduled agents that operate on customer repositories, improve DAP onboarding, collaborate across teams on platform interfaces, mentor engineers, and solve high-scale technical problems to raise engineering quality.

Develop, test, and improve the OT Security Platform as part of the Microsegmentation Product Team, ensuring high-quality software and architecture.

Design and implement secure, scalable backend services for speech inference and audio processing. Optimize networking, transcoding, latency, memory, and distributed compute orchestration. Measure and improve system performance, debug complex networking/scheduling/HPC issues, customize services for customers, and partner with Product to deliver features end-to-end.

Design, build, and improve scalable backend systems that collect hard-to-access OSINT; build pipelines and ETL for messy data; collaborate with product and mission teams; mentor engineers and ensure reliable data delivery for DoD workflows.

The Senior Backend Engineer will enhance data integration infrastructure, manage internal systems, and collaborate with teams to execute engineering tasks for growth initiatives.

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 design and implementation of Affirm's Lakehouse Platform using Iceberg, Spark, Snowflake, and cloud storage. Drive platform roadmap, governance, access controls, performance and cost optimization, analytics engineering best practices, observability, and on-call readiness. Partner cross-functionally, mentor engineers, and build scalable, secure, self-service data infrastructure and semantic/agentic data tools.

Build and operate ML training and serving infrastructure; design, develop, and launch backend systems; collaborate across teams to decompose projects; maintain availability through monitoring and on-call support; review and debug large codebases; contribute to hiring and team growth.

Design and implement scalable, secure inference services for speech processing. Optimize networking, audio transcoding, latency, memory, and distributed compute orchestration. Debug complex system issues, customize backend services for customers, and partner with Product to deliver end-to-end features.

Build reliable AI-powered, agentic backend systems to remove friction across the software development lifecycle. Design multi-step orchestration, safety checks, and evaluation tooling; apply distributed-systems judgment; work across GitLab codebases and with a distributed team to productionize solutions that may become customer-facing.

Lead technical direction for a greenfield team building agentic/LLM-backed systems to reduce SDLC friction. Drive discovery through shipping, apply distributed-systems judgment at scale, mentor engineers, own technical hiring and cross-team alignment, and evaluate correctness and safety of agentic workflows.

Lead backend development for Dragos' OT security platform: design and implement high-performance systems in Rust, optimize architectures, participate across the development lifecycle, integrate databases and third-party data providers, incorporate AI tools, mentor senior engineers, and drive cross-team architectural decisions.

Lead design and delivery of a reliability platform for production systems. Own quarterly goals, guide engineers through ambiguity, collaborate with PM/design/analytics, monitor and operate services (on-call), set quality and code standards, and mentor teammates. Integrate AI/LLM tooling to improve automation, debugging, and service health.

Lead delivery for the Batch Infrastructure team: design, build, and operate reliable, scalable compute platforms for scheduled and on-demand batch workloads. Collaborate with product/design/analytics, define technical plans, ensure availability (monitoring/on-call), set code and design standards, and mentor engineers to improve delivery and quality.

Lead backend engineering for cloud-native, event-driven data pipelines and customer integrations (especially EHRs). Evolve core data models and APIs, improve scalability and reliability, mentor engineers, define best practices, and drive end-to-end testing and AWS-based solutions.

Build, operate, and extend data platform and application-layer services enabling secure, self-service data applications at scale. Implement provisioning, CI/CD, access control, integrations, observability, automation, and incident response while contributing to semantic layer and AI-ready tooling roadmaps.

Build and maintain scalable integration and end-to-end test automation frameworks, optimize CI pipelines and test execution, improve test stability and reporting, support engineering teams with triage and best practices, write technical specs/ADRs, participate in on-call rotation, and collaborate cross-functionally to evolve the company test strategy.