Back End Engineer

What a back end engineer works on

• Build REST, GraphQL or gRPC endpoints with auth, rate limits, pagination and versioning
• Own the database layer: schema design, indexes, query plans and safe migrations on large tables
• Add Redis caching and message queues like Kafka, SQS or RabbitMQ to move slow work off the request path
• Write background workers and scheduled jobs that retry safely and never double-process an event
• Profile hot endpoints, cut p95 latency and load test before big launches
• Integrate payment, email and partner APIs with timeouts, circuit breakers and webhooks
• Keep services observable with structured logs, metrics and traces, and join on-call for them

Backend skills to test

Skill	What good looks like
Database depth	Reads an EXPLAIN plan, picks the right index and knows when to denormalize
Concurrency	Handles locks, race conditions and transactions without deadlocks in production
Caching	Chooses cache keys and expiry on purpose and plans for stale or missing data
Async processing	Designs idempotent consumers, dead-letter queues and replay for failed messages
API contracts	Keeps changes backward compatible and documents them in OpenAPI or protobuf
Scaling judgment	Explains when to shard, add read replicas or simply fix a slow query first

Interview questions and how Exordiom vets

1. A table grew to 500 million rows and queries time out. What are your options?
2. How would you design a rate limiter shared across many API servers?
3. A queue consumer processed the same order twice. How do you stop that for good?
4. When would you reach for Kafka over a simple job queue?
5. How do you change an API used by mobile clients you cannot force to upgrade?
6. Describe the hardest performance bug you have fixed and how you found it.

Red flags: no feel for query cost, retries without idempotency, caching everything by default, breaking API changes shipped casually, and no load testing before launches.

The backend engineers we place are hired away from good current jobs, so none come from an idle bench. They start with an AI interview shaped around your architecture, then human rounds that test character, acumen, grit and experience. Once they join, Hypercare check-ins take place in weeks 1 and 2, then every four weeks beginning in week 6.

India vs Philippines for back end engineers

As of Nov 1, 2026, India has the deepest backend pool: Databricks, GitLab, Okta, Pure Storage, HackerRank, Toast and PayPal are hiring backend engineers in Bengaluru and Agoda in Gurugram. The Philippines pool is smaller and full stack heavy: Manulife, for example, is hiring senior full stack software engineers in Makati. In both markets your back end engineer works your full US workday.