Backend Software Engineer — Distributed Systems / Consumer Tech Platform

Location: Palo Alto, CA

Overview

Partner with one of the world's largest consumer internet platforms, expanding its international engineering organization in Palo Alto.
The platform serves hundreds of millions of users globally across content, community, e-commerce, and advertising.
Engineering challenges include high concurrency, low latency, scalability, and cross-region distributed systems.

Responsibilities

Design and build backend systems supporting the company’s rapidly expanding international user base.
Develop large-scale distributed backend services.
Architect high-concurrency and high-throughput systems.
Build low-latency online systems.
Implement microservices and service governance.
Design cross-region and multi-region architectures.
Ensure system scalability, reliability, and fault tolerance.
Optimize performance at significant traffic volumes.
Develop core services supporting global consumer products.
Take meaningful ownership over architecture and technical decisions, including technology selection and design for core backend modules.
Maintain responsibility for stability, scalability, and low latency.

Requirements

Core Requirements:

2 - 12+ years of professional backend software engineering experience.
Strong hands-on experience with distributed systems.
Experience building backend systems for large-scale B2C / consumer-facing products.
Deep understanding of high concurrency, scalability, availability, and performance optimization.
Experience with microservices architecture and service governance.
Proficiency in Java or Go.
Familiarity with technologies such as MySQL, Redis, Kafka/RocketMQ, and Elasticsearch.
Strong coding fundamentals and ability to take ownership of complex backend modules.
Experience handling large traffic volumes, high QPS/TPS, latency-sensitive systems, or systems serving millions of users is highly relevant.

Language Requirements

English: Professional working proficiency required.
Mandarin Chinese: Mandatory, due to regular collaboration with engineering and product teams in China.
Comfortable working across geographically distributed engineering teams.

Location & Mobility:

Why Consider This Role?

Opportunity to work on backend infrastructure where scale is a fundamental engineering challenge.
Build systems supporting hundreds of millions of users, solving real-world challenges involving traffic scale, latency, consistency, reliability, distributed architecture, and global expansion.
Ideal for engineers who have built backend systems for high-scale consumer products and enjoy solving distributed systems problems.

Backend Engineer, Distributed Systems (English/Mandarin - Fully Bilingual requirement)

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