Software Engineer, Unified Gateway
The Software Engineer on the Unified Gateway team at Confidential Client is responsible for designing, building, and maintaining a scalable, reliable API Gateway platform that handles REST to gRPC translation and powers multiple client experiences. This role focuses on improving system performance, security, and resilience while enabling product teams to rapidly iterate and deploy API endpoints through a centralized, robust platform. The engineer will also champion best practices in API management and leverage AI-assisted development tools to enhance platform capabilities.
About Careertakes
👉 Important disclosure: Careertakes is a third-party recruiting platform supporting this hiring process. If selected, you will be employed directly by our client, Software Development.
Applicants for this role may also receive access to additional matched opportunities through the Careertakes platform.
About the Team
Help build a highly reliable, on-demand logistics engine used by millions. The Unified Gateway team owns the API Gateway platform that sits at the front door of high-traffic services — an HTTP-to-gRPC reverse proxy that routes REST/JSON requests to downstream gRPC services, handles auth, mapping, header propagation, encryption, and resilience, and powers mobile and web clients for multiple brands. The platform enables product teams to define, test, deploy, and operate APIs without managing their own edge services.
About the Role
Confidential Client is hiring a Software Engineer for the Unified Gateway platform. You will build and maintain the API gateway request pipeline, improve performance and reliability, and develop tooling and abstractions that make life easier for hundreds of product engineers. You’ll work on mission-critical, high-throughput systems and be a technical advocate for platform-level solutions.
What You’ll Do
- Design and build robust, scalable systems with long-term maintainability in mind.
- Improve performance, reliability, security, and scalability across the gateway and request-processing pipeline.
- Implement and drive best practices in API management, service discovery, load balancing, and fault tolerance.
- Build features that enable product teams to declaratively define and manage API endpoints.
- Troubleshoot and resolve complex issues in production, including performance bottlenecks and reliability incidents.
- Evaluate and integrate new technologies to extend platform capabilities.
- Advocate for and champion adoption of the Unified Gateway platform across engineering teams.
- Leverage AI-assisted development tools as part of the full software lifecycle.
What We’re Looking For
- 2+ years of experience in backend, infrastructure, or platform engineering.
- Experience with gRPC, REST APIs, Protocol Buffers, and service-to-service communication patterns.
- Strong knowledge of Kotlin or another JVM language for building high-scale, resilient systems; familiarity with asynchronous/reactive frameworks (e.g., Vert.x) is a plus.
- Experience operating high-throughput, mission-critical production systems.
- Solid understanding of distributed systems concepts: consistency, fault tolerance, load balancing, and resilience patterns.
- Familiarity with API gateway and proxy concerns: authentication & authorization, request routing, schema/contract management (OpenAPI), and header propagation.
- A platform-first mindset: you enjoy solving problems at the platform level and building abstractions for other engineers.
- Proficiency using AI coding tools (e.g., Claude Code, Codex, Cursor) in designing, generating, testing, and releasing code.
Compensation & Benefits
- National base pay range (U.S.): $130,600—$192,000 USD. Base salary is localized by work location and determined by job-related factors including skills, experience, and market conditions.
- Role includes opportunities for equity grants and a comprehensive benefits package (medical/dental/vision, 401(k) matching, paid parental leave, paid time off, sick time in compliance with applicable laws, and more).
- Flexible paid time off for salaried roles; defined accrual for hourly roles.
- If you need accommodations during the hiring process, please inform your recruiting contact.
Why Join
- Work on a platform that directly improves developer velocity, scalability, and reliability across many products.
- Tackle distributed systems and high-throughput challenges at scale.
- Influence platform design used by hundreds of engineers and multiple consumer-facing products.
- Collaborative environment that values diversity, inclusion, and continuous learning.
Location & Work Details
- Location: Seattle, WA (onsite or hybrid as determined by team policy).
- Employment type: Full-time.
- Applicants should follow applicable state and federal work-authorization and hiring requirements. Reasonable accommodations are available during the hiring process upon request.
Equal Opportunity & Hiring Transparency
Careertakes and our client are Equal Opportunity Employers committed to building a diverse and inclusive workforce. We prohibit discrimination or harassment of any kind. To support a fair and efficient hiring process, AI tools may be used to assist with application review or resume screening. These tools do not replace human decision-making. Final hiring decisions are made by people.
If you have questions about how your data is used, please contact us directly.
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