Backend Software Engineer (API-focused)

Job summary

Backend Software Engineer (API-focused) Katy, Texas (full-time onsite) Compensation: $110,000 - $120,000 annually Reports to: Software Engineering Manager Visa Sponsorship: Not Available Would you like to be a key member of the development team supporting hundreds of law enforcement agencies across the United States?

Benefits

Qualifications

• 3+ years of professional backend software development experience, including production use of Python.
• Strong hands-on experience with FastAPI building production APIs.
• Solid understanding of relational database design, normalization, and SQL query optimization (PostgreSQL preferred).
• Experience with Celery or a comparable distributed task queue (e.g., RQ, Kafka consumers) for asynchronous processing.
• Experience deploying and operating services in Kubernetes, ideally on Azure (AKS).
• Practical experience writing unit, integration, and functional tests (pytest or similar) as part of the regular development workflow.
• Working knowledge of authentication and authorization standards (OAuth2, JWT, API keys, RBAC).
• Understanding of API security best practices (OWASP API Top 10, input sanitization, secrets management, rate limiting).
• Comfort with Git-based collaborative workflows (pull requests, code review, branching strategies).
• Familiarity with containerization (Docker) and CI/CD pipelines.
• Clear communication and a collaborative, ownership-driven approach to working with engineers.
• Preferred

Responsibilities

• You'll write asynchronous background jobs with Celery, design and optimize PostgreSQL schemas and queries, and build in the authentication, authorization, and security practices our platform depends on.
• Design and build production-grade FastAPI services — define clean, versioned RESTful API contracts, request/response schemas (Pydantic), and service boundaries within our microservice architecture.
• Own data modeling and query design — design normalized, performant PostgreSQL schemas, write and optimize SQL queries, and manage migrations (e.g., Alembic) as services evolve.
• Build reliable asynchronous workflows — design and maintain Celery tasks and queues for background processing, retries, and scheduled jobs.
• Ship and operate services on our Azure/Kubernetes platform — containerize services, deploy to AKS, and troubleshoot issues in a live production environment.
• Write meaningful, layered test coverage — unit, integration, and functional/end-to-end tests (pytest) that give the team confidence to ship quickly.
• Participate in code reviews and design discussions — give and receive thoughtful feedback and help shape API and data model decisions across the team.
• Instrument services for observability — add logging, metrics, and tracing so issues can be diagnosed quickly in production.
• Collaborate cross-functionally — partner with frontend, mobile, and DevOps engineers to define API contracts and keep services aligned with product needs.
• Contribute to CI/CD pipelines — help maintain automated build, test, and deployment workflows for the services you own.
• Required

Skills

Degrees

Languages

Industry

Company size

Security clearance