Senior Engineer, Backend: Cloud & API Development (Remote)

QCi • Arlington, VA

9h • Remote

About The Position

We are seeking a Senior Cloud API Developer to maintain and develop our cloud APIs which allow users to interact with our photonic quantum hardware. In this role, you will maintain and expand a microservices ecosystem that orchestrates complex optimization jobs, manages user access, and connects high-level cloud APIs and low-level hardware controllers.
You will be working in a hybrid environment, developing services that will run on cloud as well as on resource-constrained on-premise hardware stacks. This is a role that requires expertise in distributed systems, asynchronous event messaging, and strict API security standards.

Requirements

• 5+ years of professional backend software engineering experience.
• Expert proficiency in Golang and Python for production services.
• Strong background in message queuing systems (RabbitMQ, Kafka, or NATS) and event-driven architecture patterns.
• Proven track record of implementing API security best practices, including OAuth2, JWT, and protection against OWASP Top 10 vulnerabilities (Injection, Broken Auth).
• Experience designing scalable database schemas (SQL, NoSQL) and managing databases with indexing and TTL.

Nice To Haves

• Experience with gRPC and Protocol Buffers
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines (GitLab CI, GitHub Actions) and automated testing strategies.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain high-performance RESTful APIs using Golang and Python to support a broad ecosystem.
• Architect asynchronous, event-driven workflows using RabbitMQ (or similar message brokers) to decouple job scheduling, hardware execution, and result processing.
• Optimize service-to-service communication to ensure low latency and high reliability across a distributed stack.
• Monitor system health and implement distributed tracing to debug complex microservice interactions.
• Implement industry-standard security best practices for API authentication and authorization (OAuth2, OIDC, mTLS).
• Work within existing deployment and testing patterns to add new services to CI/CD.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Education Level: No Education Listed