(Principal) Backend Development Engineer

Role Overview

Develop and maintain the backend capabilities of the Reach Platform across push notifications, SMS, email, and other messaging channels. Work closely with Compliance, Security, Product, Frontend, QA, and third-party providers to support message delivery across the company's global sites.

Responsibilities

Develop the Reach Platform backend and its core capabilities across push notifications, SMS, email, WhatsApp, and other messaging channels. Own architecture design, feature development, performance optimization, reliability, and day-to-day operations for the delivery chain.

Build unified, reliable, efficient, and scalable messaging infrastructure for multiple sites and business lines. Core capabilities include message intake, task scheduling, user routing, channel selection, provider management, frequency limits and safeguards against erroneous sends, priority scheduling, delivery status callbacks, reporting, and effectiveness analysis. Ensure timely and reliable delivery at high volume and under high concurrency.

Improve platform reliability and observability through monitoring, alerts, logs, distributed tracing, and service level objectives (SLOs). Improve the speed of incident detection, diagnosis, and recovery. Plan capacity, run load tests, and optimize the system for large-scale campaigns, traffic spikes, and operational activities.

Collaborate with Product, Frontend, client engineering, QA, Data, Compliance, Security, Procurement, and third-party providers. Deliver compliant messaging capabilities across countries and regions, supporting marketing campaigns, trading alerts, security notifications, one-time passwords (OTPs), and system notifications. Provide stable, efficient, secure, and measurable messaging services for users worldwide.

Requirements

Essential Qualifications

Bachelor's degree or above in computer science or a related field, with at least five years of backend development experience.

Strong proficiency in Go or Java, solid distributed systems design skills, and experience with high-concurrency messaging or queueing systems.

Proficiency with Kafka, including event-driven architectures, consumer group management, and consumer lag monitoring.

Familiarity with Redis caching, rate limiting, distributed locks, and hot-key management.

Familiarity with MySQL schema design and optimization, including table sharding strategies, index optimization, and slow query remediation.

Familiarity with gRPC-based microservice communication and service discovery using Nacos.

Familiarity with Kubernetes deployments and an understanding of horizontal pod autoscaling (HPA).

Strong system design skills and the ability to independently design technical solutions for complex requirements.

A strong sense of ownership and responsibility, with a proactive approach to production alerts and timely incident response.

Proficiency with AI coding tools such as Claude Code, Cursor, or GitHub Copilot, and the ability to use them for coding, code review, debugging, and solution design while improving development efficiency.

Work location: Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, or Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.

Preferred Qualifications

Experience developing SMS, email, or push notification systems. Experience with large-scale delivery, task scheduling, channel management, and reliability engineering is especially valuable.

Familiarity with Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM), Apple Push Notification service (APNs), Amazon Simple Email Service (SES), and major SMS or communications providers. Practical experience with provider quotas, rate limits, delivery callbacks, error analysis, and delivery rate optimization is preferred.

Experience deploying AI capabilities in production, such as intelligent reconciliation, anomaly detection, operations intelligence, analytics, or agent-based workflows.