Remote Backend Developer Jobs in Cincinnati, OH (NOW HIRING)

For more than three decades, Strategic Data Systems (SDS) has been a software consultancy firm specializing in strategy, technology, and business transformation for Fortune 100 companies, mid-sized firms, and startups. At SDS, we empower our development teams to address our clients’ critical business challenges by leveraging cutting edge technologies. If you seek a workplace where your contributions are truly appreciated, then SDS is the company for you. Join us today to work alongside fellow development specialists and become a crucial part of our dynamic and cohesive community.

Job Title: Lead Backend Engineer - Node.js/TypeScript, Distributed Systems

Location: REMOTE USA

Years of Experience: 8-10+

TOP SKILLS:

The manager is looking for stronger alignment in a few key areas:

• Strong Node.js experience in addition to Java
• Meaningful, recent Azure experience
• Experience working with similar backend systems/platforms
• Resumes that clearly and accurately demonstrate the candidate’s experience and work history
• Thinks in systems, not just services.
• Makes sound design decisions within an established architecture.
• Writes clean, maintainable, and well-tested code.
• Operates effectively when requirements are incomplete and knows when to ask versus when to decide.
• Understands the importance of operational excellence and building software that is observable, reliable, and resilient.
• Balances speed of delivery with long-term maintainability.
• Communicates effectively across engineering, product, and business stakeholders.
• This is a Node.js first environment, and Java heavy backgrounds without meaningful Node.js experience will not be sufficient.

Technologies You'll Work With

Node.js, TypeScript, Microsoft Azure, Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Azure Service Bus, Azure Functions, Cosmos DB, REST APIs, Docker, Kubernetes, Helm, GitHub Actions, OpenTelemetry, Dynatrace

What You’ll Do

• We're looking for a Senior Backend Engineer to help build and scale the large-scale distributed systems behind our fulfillment platforms. This is a hands-on engineering role for someone who enjoys complex distributed systems problems, designs resilient cloud-native services, and can operate with a high degree of autonomy.
• You'll work alongside product managers, architects, engineering managers, and engineers on other teams to build highly available services operating at enterprise scale.

Required Qualifications

• 6+ years of professional software engineering experience building backend applications.
• Strong recent production experience with Node.js and TypeScript, including asynchronous patterns and runtime performance characteristics.
• Experience designing and building large-scale distributed systems in production environments.
• Deep understanding of microservice architecture and event-driven application design.
• Hands-on experience building and operating asynchronous, message-based systems. You should be able to speak concretely about idempotency, out-of-order delivery, retry and dead-letter handling, and consumer lag, from systems you have run rather than read about.
• Experience developing and maintaining RESTful APIs.
• Experience with NoSQL databases, including partitioning and consistency tradeoffs.
• Strong, recent hands-on experience building and operating production applications on Microsoft Azure.
• Experience with containerized applications using Docker and Kubernetes.
• Strong understanding of CI/CD pipelines and modern DevOps practices.
• Ability to diagnose problems from production telemetry: logs, traces, and metrics, rather than only from local reproduction.
• Ability to work across team boundaries. This platform depends on systems owned by other teams, and you will need to go get answers rather than wait for them.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS).
• Experience with Azure Service Bus, Kafka, or similar messaging technologies, including topics, subscriptions, and filtering.
• Experience with Cosmos DB or a comparable partitioned NoSQL store.
• NestJS or a comparable structured Node framework.
• Kubernetes autoscaling, Helm, and CI/CD pipeline work.
• Experience with high-throughput systems where latency and cost per request are engineering constraints.
• Experience implementing observability using OpenTelemetry and an APM platform such as Dynatrace, Datadog, or New Relic.
• Experience working within large enterprise environments supporting mission-critical applications.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and maintain scalable backend services using Node.js and TypeScript.
• Build cloud-native applications on Microsoft Azure, leveraging platform services to create resilient, secure, and highly available solutions.
• Contribute to the design and evolution of distributed systems supporting order fulfillment across thousands of stores.
• Build event-driven services and asynchronous processing pipelines, including the correctness concerns that come with them.
• Develop high-performance REST APIs that power associate-facing applications.
• Diagnose performance and scaling behavior in production and lower environments: throughput ceilings, autoscaling, and resource sizing.
• Extend observability, distributed tracing, and metrics so that system behavior is measurable rather than inferred.
• Partner with Product, UX, Mobile, and Frontend teams to design APIs and services that deliver exceptional user experiences.
• Contribute to technical design discussions and architecture reviews.
• Identify opportunities to improve system reliability, scalability, observability, and operational efficiency.
• Champion engineering practices including automated testing and CI/CD.
• Support production readiness and the operational work that follows capacity, failure modes, and incident response.
• Evaluate emerging technologies, including AI-assisted development tools, to improve engineering productivity and software quality.

What You’ll Get

SDS, Inc. provides equal employment opportunities (EEO) to all employees and applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, national origin, age, disability, genetic information, marital status, amnesty, or status as a covered veteran in accordance with applicable federal, state, and local laws.

• Competitive base salary
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance coverage
• Optional life and disability insurance provided
• 401(k) with a company match and optional profit sharing
• Paid vacation time
• Paid Bench time
• Training allowance offering
• You’ll be eligible to earn referral bonuses!