Senior Backend Software Engineer - Distributed Systems

Havoc is a leader in all-domain collaborative autonomy. Its software-defined hardware approach powers military and commercial-grade autonomous systems across sea, air, and land to sense, decide, and act together in complex and contested environments. Havoc connects assets, enabling them to share information, adapt in real time, and continue operating even when communications are disrupted or denied. Havoc optimizes mission performance and minimizes human risk.

About the Role

We are seeking a Senior Backend Engineer to drive the development of scalable, high-performance backend systems that power our autonomous platforms.

In this role, you will be hands-on in architecture and development as a senior individual contributor. You will be responsible for designing and building highly concurrent, distributed systems in Go, helping set technical direction, and ensuring reliable, secure, and performant backend services.

Key Responsibilities

• Technical Ownership: Drive execution and technical excellence across backend projects, set engineering standards, conduct code reviews, and guide architectural decisions.
• Backend Architecture & Development: Design, build, and maintain scalable, highly concurrent backend services in Go, architect distributed systems that support high throughput, reliability, and real-time operations.
• System Performance & Reliability: Optimize backend systems for performance, scalability, and resilience, identify and resolve bottlenecks in distributed systems and concurrency-heavy workloads.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner with frontend, platform, autonomy, and embedded teams to integrate services across applications and devices, support end-to-end system design from edge devices to cloud infrastructure.
• Security & Best Practices: Enforce secure development practices across backend systems, maintain high standards for code quality, testing, documentation, and reliability.

Qualifications

• 6+ years of experience in backend engineering, distributed systems engineering, or related software engineering roles.
• Strong expertise in Go and building highly concurrent systems.
• Experience designing and operating highly available, fault-tolerant distributed systems at scale.
• Experience with consensus and coordination primitives, such as etcd, Raft, leader election, or similar patterns for multi-zone deployments.