Job Description

About the team:

HackerRank’s Platform Engineering team is responsible for building the foundation that powers our API, Web, AI, and Data services. We focus on developer productivity, scalability, and security while ensuring platform reliability. Our team builds self-service tools, standardized workflows, and automation to help engineers across the company ship high-quality products faster.

About the role:

As a Senior Software Engineer - Platform, your primary focus will be on building and scaling our API platform—the backbone of HackerRank’s services. You will design, develop, and maintain a scalable, secure, and developer-friendly API ecosystem while ensuring best practices in governance, security, and automation. Your work will be critical in accelerating product delivery, enhancing developer experience, and ensuring platform stability.

What you’ll do:

• Design and evolve the API platform to ensure standardization, scalability, and governance across services.
• Enhance developer experience by building self-service tools, automation, and well-documented APIs.
• Drive automation in API deployment, infrastructure provisioning, and CI/CD workflows for efficiency.
• Implement and enforce security measures such as OAuth2, OpenID Connect, rate limiting, and API access controls to protect data and prevent misuse.
• Collaborate with teams to promote platform adoption, improve reliability, and optimize system performance.

You will thrive in this role if:

• You excel at designing scalable platforms and ensuring that APIs and services are reusable, efficient, and maintainable across teams.
• You are passionate about developer experience, creating intuitive, well-documented APIs and self-service tools that streamline development.
• You have a track record of automating workflows reducing manual effort in API management, deployment, and infrastructure provisioning.
• You have worked with SQL and NoSQL databases, designing scalable data models, optimizing queries, and making informed trade-offs based on use cases.
• You collaborate closely with developers & product teams, understanding their challenges and workflows to design solutions that integrate seamlessly.

What you bring:

• 4+ years of experience in backend or platform engineering with a strong focus on API platforms.
• Deep expertise in API design (REST, GraphQL, gRPC) and API lifecycle management.
• Proficiency in microservices architectures, distributed systems, and service discovery.
• Experience with container orchestration (Kubernetes, Docker) and cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure).
• Strong knowledge of API gateways (AWS API Gateway, Kong, etc.), service meshes (Istio, Linkerd), and observability tools.
• Exposure to SQL and NoSQL databases, designing scalable schemas, optimizing query performance, and making trade-offs based on requirements.
• Proven track record of improving API security, governance, and automation.
• Hands-on experience with CI/CD automation and infrastructure-as-code tools like Terraform.
• Familiarity with event-driven architectures, messaging systems like Kafka, and resilience patterns (circuit breaking, retries, and distributed tracing).