About the role
Requirements:
- 6 to 8 years in backend engineering with experience building shared services or platform components consumed by other teams - understanding that your customer is internal engineering is essential.
- Has designed and maintained SDKs or shared libraries in production - knows what SDK stability means and has experienced the pain of breaking changes.
- Experience with API gateway configuration and service mesh management in a microservices environment.
- Active AI tool user - uses Cursor and Claude for development today; AI-assisted engineering is standard practice.
Mindset and Soft Skills:
- Platform identity: Platform identity: 'My customer is other engineers' - takes pride in developer experience, documentation quality, and SDK ergonomics.
- Reliability: Reliability obsession: platform services fail for twelve squads simultaneously when they go down - takes on-call, postmortems, and SLO management seriously.
- AI-native: AI-native developer: Cursor and Claude are open all day - models the AI-augmented engineering practice Phoenix is responsible for demonstrating.
- Documentation: Documentation culture: platform code without great docs is unusable - write runbooks, SDK guides, and ADRs as part of the definition of done.
Technical Skills:
- Backend Engineering - Core: Java / Spring Boot and microservices / platform service design, REST API design (OpenAPI) and event-driven architecture (SQS / Kafka), SDK design and development and distributed systems patterns.
- Platform Engineering - Core: API gateway implementation and service mesh (Istio / Linkerd), IAM / OAuth2 / RBAC implementation and feature flag systems, OpenTelemetry / distributed tracing and contract testing (Pact).
- AI Native - Core Expectation: Cursor for daily development and Claude for coding and documentation, AI SDK integration design and LLM API patterns (rate limiting/fallback).
- Added advantage: Kotlin and AWS (API GW / SQS / Lambda, Kong / Envoy and Kafka) and domain-driven design.