Senior Backend Engineer

Job description

Sage is on a mission to improve care and quality of life for older adults, starting with those residing in senior living facilities. Falls are the leading cause of injury-related death among adults over 65. And yet, fall prevention and emergency response systems for older adults are archaic and ineffective. At Sage we’ve built a more modern way of understanding when older adults need help, including methods for residents to alert caregivers when in need of help, and corresponding software for caregivers to triage response. Our company mission is to create a product that our client counterparts love, and this role is a key part of that objective.

Sage is a small, tight team of ambitious, multi-disciplinary entrepreneurs. We are a software-enabled, mission-driven company, and are focused only on the problems that are central to achieving that mission. At Sage, we work hard and fast but also know that to build a truly important company, we need to treat our work as a marathon, and not a sprint. The journey matters.

About this Role

We’re looking for an experienced Backend Engineer to join our engineering team as a senior IC focused on backend service development for a product for a new market currently under development. Our platform is mission-critical, with many moving parts: distributed services, relational and NoSQL data stores, message queues, real-time data pipelines, and a growing set of APIs that must perform reliably at scale.

In this role, you’ll take ownership of designing and building scalable backend services that sit at the core of the product. You’ll work across Java-based microservices, databases, and messaging layers to ensure the stack is cleanly designed, performant, observable, and maintainable. You’ll also be central to shaping how we design and manage APIs and how backend systems integrate with front-end applications and core infrastructure. This is a highly impactful position where you’ll define patterns and practices for service design and data architecture while mentoring others and shaping the future of our backend engineering.

Responsibilities

• Architect & Build Services: Design, implement, and scale backend services in Java using frameworks like Spring Boot or Dropwizard.
• Data & Persistence: Design data models and persistence strategies across Postgres and NoSQL stores (DynamoDB or similar).
• Messaging & Integration: Build and operate systems that leverage message queues (SQS, Kafka, etc.) for asynchronous communication and event-driven workflows.
• API Design & Management: Define, document, and evolve REST APIs using OpenAPI, ensuring consistency, clarity, and strong collaboration with front-end teams.
• Optimize for Scale & Reliability: Ensure services are performant, observable, fault-tolerant, and capable of handling ²⁴⁄₇ production workloads.
• CI/CD & Tooling: Own build pipelines and service delivery using Gradle, automated testing, and CI/CD best practices.
• Collaborate Cross-Functionally: Work closely with front-end engineers to design API contracts, and with infrastructure engineers to ensure backend services integrate seamlessly into our containerized, cloud-native platform.
• Service & Data Design Leadership: Set patterns for clean, consistent API design, service boundaries, and data architecture across the engineering org.
• Mentor & Guide: Provide technical leadership, perform design and code reviews, and coach teammates in backend engineering best practices.

Minimum Qualifications

• Core Backend Engineering
  • Strong proficiency in Java and backend service frameworks ( Spring Boot, Dropwizard).
  • Deep familiarity with ORMs (Hibernate, JPA) and data persistence patterns.
  • Solid understanding of service design principles and clean architecture patterns.
• Data & Storage
  • Hands-on experience with Postgres and SQL performance tuning.
  • Working knowledge of NoSQL databases (DynamoDB, MongoDB, or similar).
  • Understanding of transactions, consistency, and data modeling in distributed systems.
• Messaging & Asynchronous Processing
  • Experience with SQS, Kafka, or equivalent queues/streaming systems.
  • Knowledge of event-driven architecture and at-least-once/exactly-once delivery guarantees.
• API Design & Collaboration
  • Experience designing, documenting, and evolving APIs with OpenAPI.
  • Familiarity with best practices for RESTful API versioning, error handling, and security.
  • Strong collaboration skills for working with frontend engineers (consumer experience) and infrastructure engineers (reliability and deployment).
• Build & Deployment
  • Familiarity with Gradle build system and dependency management.
  • Strong experience with CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab, or similar).
  • Knowledge of containerization & orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes).
• Systems & Observability
  • Strong understanding of logging, monitoring, and tracing in distributed systems.
  • Experience troubleshooting production issues in complex, containerized environments.
• Design & Leadership
  • Familiarity with software design patterns and ability to apply them thoughtfully.
  • Strong opinions about service design, API design, and data architecture.
  • Ability to mentor peers and set engineering standards.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in multi-tenant SaaS environments.
• Exposure to high-throughput, low-latency systems.
• Background in domain-driven design (DDD) or event-sourcing.
• Familiarity with cloud-native services (AWS/GCP).

Benefits and Pay

Our headquarters are located in New York City’s Union Square. We believe in cross team collaboration. We think good ideas can come from anyone, and we’ve designed our processes to encourage participation from all. While we take our mission seriously, we don’t take ourselves too seriously. We like to host offsites, outings, and team meals where we can connect as people, not just as colleagues. We offer office lunch and a fully stocked snack bar. While we are an in office culture, we allow up to 2 remote days per week.

Our benefits package for employees includes competitive base compensation along with stock options. The expected annual salary range for this role is $175,000-210,000 USD, depending on your level of expertise, your experience, and your performance in the interview process. We also provide fully-paid health and dental insurance coverage for all of our employees, along with other health benefits including vision insurance, membership to premium primary and urgent care, and online medical health providers. We also have a take as you need time off policy, in addition to 7 paid holidays and a company wide winter break during the holidays.

EEO Statement

Sage is an equal opportunity employer that is committed to diversity and inclusion in the workplace. We prohibit discrimination and harassment of any kind based on race, color, sex, religion, sexual orientation, national origin, disability, genetic information, pregnancy, or any other protected characteristic as outlined by federal, state, or local laws.

This policy applies to all employment practices within our organization, including hiring, recruiting, promotion, termination, layoff, recall, leave of absence, compensation, benefits, training, and apprenticeship. Sage makes hiring decisions based solely on qualifications, merit, and business needs at the time.