Senior Backend Engineer

Position: Senior Backend Engineer Employment Type: Full-Time Work Arrangement: Primarily Remote Position Summary Zip Zap IT is seeking a Senior Backend Engineer with 10+ years experience to support the development, integration, and continuous improvement of an enterprise automated testing platform supporting the Federal Student Aid (FSA) enterprise. The Senior Backend Engineer will design, develop, integrate, test, and maintain backend services and automation capabilities that support enterprise test orchestration, test-data management, reporting, release readiness, standards enforcement, and integration with application, CI/CD, observability, and issue-tracking platforms. This role is particularly suited to an engineer who is comfortable working across APIs, backend services, automation, data, and enterprise integrations and who can translate complex testing requirements into reliable, maintainable technical solutions. Key Responsibilities Design, develop, test, and maintain backend services supporting the enterprise automated testing platform.

Develop and integrate APIs and services supporting test execution, orchestration, reporting, test history, test metadata, and release-readiness capabilities.

Develop automation supporting test-data creation, refresh, seeding, reset, validation, and management.

Build integrations with CI/CD pipelines, observability platforms, issue-tracking systems, and other enterprise applications.

Support automated collection, processing, and aggregation of test results and quality metrics.

Develop services and utilities that support automated release-readiness checks and testing standards enforcement.

Contribute to reusable testing tools, templates, libraries, and automation patterns that can be adopted by application teams.

Design solutions that are reliable, scalable, secure, maintainable, and suitable for enterprise use.

Develop and maintain automated tests for backend services and integrations.

Troubleshoot failures, integration issues, test reliability problems, and defects across environments.

Collaborate with the Staff Backend Engineer, Staff Platform Engineer, Full-stack Engineers, Software Engineers in Test, application teams, and Government stakeholders.

Participate in Agile ceremonies, backlog refinement, sprint planning, demonstrations, and retrospectives.

Contribute to technical documentation, architecture documentation, runbooks, operational artifacts, and transition materials.

Support performance, reliability, and observability requirements for backend services.

Participate in application-team onboarding and provide technical guidance related to adoption of enterprise testing capabilities.

Required Qualifications Demonstrated experience developing and supporting backend software applications, services, or platforms.

Strong experience developing and integrating APIs and enterprise services.

Experience with databases and data-oriented application development.

Experience developing automated solutions rather than relying on manual processes.

Experience integrating software with CI/CD pipelines and other enterprise development tools.

Experience troubleshooting complex software, integration, and environment issues.

Experience working in Agile software development environments.

Ability to develop maintainable, well-documented, and testable software.

Ability to collaborate effectively with technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Desired Qualifications Experience developing enterprise testing platforms or test automation tooling.

Experience with automated test orchestration or test-result management.

Experience with test-data generation, seeding, masking, reset, or validation.

Experience with performance testing or performance engineering.

Experience integrating applications with observability and monitoring platforms.

Experience with GitLab and GitLab CI/CD.

Experience with Datadog or comparable observability platforms.

Experience with cloud-based application development.

Experience with infrastructure-as-code and automated deployment practices.

Federal government or other highly regulated enterprise IT experience.

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