Backend Platform Engineer

Application Deadline:
15 April 2026

Department:
Engineering

Location:
Portland, Oregon

Compensation:
$80,000 - $100,000 / year

Description
Backend Platform Engineer
Java · Spring Boot · Distributed Systems
ClearlyRated · USA (Remote-West Coast Only) · Engineering
We’re building the integration backbone that connects enterprise data systems, moves events at scale, and powers survey automation for some of the world’s largest professional services firms. If you love distributed systems, API design, and clean backend engineering — read on.
About ClearlyRated
ClearlyRated is a B2B SaaS platform that helps professional services firms — from global engineering consultancies to staffing agencies — measure, understand, and act on client satisfaction data. Our NPS-driven platform processes millions of survey interactions, powers real-time relationship health scoring, and is in the middle of a significant platform evolution: new data integration architecture, event-driven survey automation, and a growing AI/ML capability stack built on Google Cloud.
We’re a small, focused engineering team building systems that operate at enterprise scale. That means the problems are real, the stakes are high, and every engineer on the team does work that matters.
Key Responsibilities
What You’ll Build
Real systems that enterprise clients depend on. Not greenfield experiments, but a world class brand new platform with production code that has to be correct, observable, and resilient:
– Integration layer that ingests structured data from enterprise sources (Snowflake, BigQuery, SQL databases) and routes it through our platform
– A Snowflake-to-BigQuery bridge over ODBC: custom infrastructure work that will serve as the pattern for all future enterprise integrations
– Webhook-triggered survey automation engine. Business events in the client’s system translate into survey sends through a reliable, auditable event pipeline
– REST APIs consumed by our frontend, enterprise integrations, and third-party clients — you’ll design contracts that have to last
– Event-driven microservices on GCP Pub/Sub and Kafka — async processing, backpressure handling, dead-letter queues, the full picture
– Security and SSO integration for enterprise clients with complex credential and access models
– Permission and access control systems that reflect matrix organizational hierarchies — the authorization layer is genuinely interesting here
Skills, Knowledge and Expertise
Our Stack
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Java 18+
Spring Boot
MySQL / PostgreSQL
Kafka
GCP Pub/Sub
BigQuery
Kubernetes
REST APIs
CI/CD
.NET / C#
What We’re Looking For
–
Java you understand at the JVM level.
Concurrency, memory model, garbage collection, exception hierarchy — you can reason about what the runtime is doing, not just what your code says.
–
Spring Boot / Spring ecosystem depth.
Or deep understanding of dependency injection and IoC from another framework — we care that you understand the pattern, not just the annotations.
–
SQL and data modelling confidence.
You can write a query with joins, aggregations, and window functions. You think about indexes. You understand what an N+1 problem looks like in production.
–
API design instincts.
You know what makes an API contract good and what makes it a maintenance nightmare. You’ve thought about versioning, error semantics, and idempotency.
–
Systems thinking under failure.
You consider retries, timeouts, idempotency, and consistency before you consider happy paths.
–
You’ve built something that handles real load.
Even in a personal or academic context — something where correctness and reliability were actual constraints, not just nice-to-haves.
Bonus Points
–
.NET / C# experience is a genuine plus.
We maintain services in both ecosystems. Engineers who can move across the Java–.NET boundary are valuable.
– GCP experience: Pub/Sub, Dataflow, BigQuery, Vertex AI
– Kafka or other message queue experience: consumer groups, offset management, partition strategy
– Kubernetes and container orchestration
– Event sourcing or CQRS patterns
– Experience with observability tooling — distributed tracing, structured logging, alerting on the things that matter
Benefits
How We Hire
We hire on ability, not tenure. We don’t care whether your experience comes from a top university, a bootcamp, an open-source project, or a side hustle you built at 2am. What we care about is whether you can think clearly, build well, and learn fast.
Our interview process is deliberately hard. If you make it through, you’ll know you earned it — and so will we. We test fundamentals, systems thinking, and the ability to reason through problems you haven’t seen before. We don’t ask you to recite design patterns. We ask you to think.
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| Our backend interview tests: Java fundamentals and JVM reasoning, systems design, API design, SQL, and your ability to think through distributed system failure modes. We give you real-world scenarios, not toy problems. Expect to discuss trade-offs, not just correct answers. .NET/C# candidates will be evaluated on transferable depth, not language syntax.