About the role
Phoenix is the platform engineering squad - the team responsible for the shared backend infrastructure that all squads build on. API gateway, service mesh, shared platform services, the AI SDK integration layer, and the IAM/RBAC SDK are all Phoenix territory.
Senior Backend Engineers on Phoenix are building the surfaces other engineers use. Your customer is not the end borrower - it is the 12 squads that depend on Phoenix's APIs, SDKs, and shared services to build their features. Platform engineering is a product discipline, and the quality of what you build determines the velocity of the entire engineering organisation.
Key Responsibilities
Platform Service Development
• Build and maintain the shared backend platform services - the IAM/RBAC SDK, the AI SDK wrapper, the notification service, the event bus, and the feature flag system that every squad consumes
• Own the IAM/RBAC SDK implementation - translating the Cloud-Native Platform Architect's design into a production-ready SDK that twelve squads can integrate with confidence
• Build the AI SDK integration layer - the secure, consistent interface for squads to call LLM APIs with rate limiting, cost tracking, PII redaction, and fallback handling built in
• Design and implement the shared event bus patterns - how domain events are published, subscribed to, and replayed across services using SQS or Kafka
• Write the platform SDK documentation and integration guides that product squad engineers use to onboard themselves without requiring Phoenix involvement
API Gateway & Service Mesh
• Own the API gateway implementation - routing configuration, authentication enforcement, rate limiting rules, and the observability instrumentation that feeds into the platform monitoring stack
• Implement service mesh configuration for inter-service communication - mTLS, circuit breakers, retry policies, and traffic management for the twelve-service landscape
• Define and enforce API standards in collaboration with the Cloud-Native Platform Architect - contract-first development, OpenAPI spec, versioning, and backward compatibility discipline
• Build the API testing infrastructure - consumer-driven contract tests that catch breaking changes before deployment and give squads confidence in the API gateway configuration
AI-Native Platform Engineering
• Use Cursor and Claude as primary development tools - the Phoenix engineering standard is AI-augmented development; all code, tests, and documentation are AI-assisted
• Build the n8n and AppSmith integration hooks - the platform-level API endpoints and webhooks that allow Rangers' automations to interact safely with platform services
• Implement observability instrumentation across platform services - distributed tracing (OpenTelemetry), structured logging, and metrics that give the organisation visibility into platform health
Quality, Reliability & Mentoring
• Set and maintain code quality standards within Phoenix - code review, refactoring discipline, test coverage, and the mentoring of Intermediate and Associate engineers
• Own platform service reliability - SLO monitoring, incident response, and the postmortem process when platform services affect product squad delivery
• Contribute to the Platform Guild - share platform engineering knowledge, present implementation decisions, and participate in cross-squad technical discussions
Requirements
Professional Experience
• 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
• 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 twelve squads simultaneously when they go down - takes on-call, postmortems, and SLO management seriously
• AI-native: AI-native developer: Cursor and Claude open all day - models the AI-augmented engineering practice Phoenix is responsible for demonstrating
• Documentation: Documentation culture: platform code without great docs is unusable - writes runbooks, SDK guides, and ADRs as part of the definition of done
AI SDK integration design & LLM API patterns (rate limiting / fallback)
Domain-driven design