SDE II

Our Story

At The Alter Office, we build what comes next. We operate as an internal innovation lab, creating stealth products, new business bets, and high-leverage systems designed to unlock disproportionate value for us and our partner company ITW Consulting.

Our work is not centered around being a conventional service partner. Instead, we focus on building products and platforms that solve complex, strategic problems and create long-term advantage. Where needed, we have stepped in on critical opportunities beyond the usual scope, especially when speed, product thinking, and execution depth mattered most.

About the Role

We are building a holistic AdTech platform that delivers premium value to both advertisers and publishers, and the backend is where that entire ecosystem actually runs - the ad marketplace, campaign creation, ad-serving decisioning, analytics collection, attribution, and ROAS measurement.

Concretely, that means large-scale architecture: the ad-serving systems that make real-time decisioning calls at volume, the scalable data platforms that ingest and process billions of events a day, the analytics platforms that turn that data into attribution and ROAS numbers advertisers and publishers trust, and the autonomous AI agents we're building to automate campaign optimization and decisioning across the platform.

We are looking for a Backend Engineer who wants to be genuinely involved in building these areas out - not just implementing tickets, but understanding the product and system tradeoffs behind them - and who'll grow into owning larger pieces of the platform over time.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain the backend systems and APIs behind our ad marketplace, campaign management, and analytics/attribution pipelines.
• Contribute to the scalable data platforms and ad-serving systems that process and act on data at volume.
• Help build and maintain the backend infrastructure behind our autonomous AI agents.
• Collaborate with product, other backend engineers, and DevOps to ship end-to-end features.
• Model and manage data using SQL (MySQL, PostgreSQL) and NoSQL (MongoDB, Redis), including caching where useful.
• Implement authentication, authorization, and data security practices under senior engineers' guidance.
• Write clean, well-documented, well-tested code.
• Deploy, monitor, and scale services on cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure).
• Use Docker (and optionally Kubernetes) for containerization of backend services.
• Contribute to and help maintain CI/CD pipelines.
• Monitor and debug production issues using observability tooling (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, ELK).
• Participate actively in code reviews and contribute to team development standards.
• Work within event-driven or microservices architectures, using tools like GraphQL, WebSockets, or message brokers (Kafka, RabbitMQ) where they fit the problem.

Requirements

• 2–4 years of professional backend engineering experience.
• Deep experience with a backend language and its ecosystem (e.g., Node.js/Express, Python, Java, Go); comfortable owning services end-to-end in production.
• Strong understanding of RESTful API design and asynchronous programming.
• Solid experience with relational and NoSQL databases, including basic data modeling.
• Familiarity with Docker, Git, and modern CI/CD workflows.
• Hands-on experience deploying to cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or Azure).
• Working knowledge of backend security best practices.
• Strong problem-solving, debugging, and communication skills.
• Comfortable in a fast-paced, agile environment with evolving priorities.
• Exposure to monitoring, logging, or performance profiling in production is a plus.
• Experience with message brokers (Kafka, RabbitMQ) or GraphQL is a plus.
• Experience with Kubernetes is a plus.