Senior Backend Engineer

Kforce has a client that is seeking a Senior Backend Engineer in San Antonio, TX. Summary: The Senior Backend Engineer will build, operate, and scale Python APIs and backend services that integrate AI capabilities (e.g., Google Gemini via Vertex AI) to power internal and external applications. You will not build models; you will productionize integrations, orchestrations, and data flows around them. Duties:

• Design, implement, and document FastAPI services and SDKs for AI features
• Integrate third-party AI providers (Gemini, Bedrock, OpenAI) with secure, observable patterns
• Build event-driven and synchronous backends (REST/webhooks/queues) with robust error handling
• Optimize latency, throughput, and cost; Add caching, rate limiting, and retries/circuit breakers
• Ship high-quality code with tests, CI/CD
• Instrument services (structured logs, metrics, traces) and own production readiness/runbooks
• Collaborate with product, data, and ML teams to translate requirements into APIs and workflows
• Uphold security, privacy, and compliance (secrets, OAuth/OIDC, PII handling)
• 4-8+ years of software engineering (mid-senior); strong Python 3.x
• Production FastAPI (or Flask) delivering secure, versioned APIs
• Cloud experience on GCP or AWS (e.g., Cloud Run/GKE/Pub/Sub or Lambda/EKS/API Gateway/SQS)
• Datastores: Postgres/MySQL and one of Redis/ElastiCache/Memorystore; Migrations and schema design
• CI/CD (GitHub Actions/Cloud Build), containerization (Docker), IaC familiarity (Terraform helpful)
• Testing culture (unit/integration/contract), API specs (OpenAPI), and observability
• Strong grasp of resiliency patterns and performance tuning in distributed systems

• Experience integrating AI services (Vertex AI/Gemini, AWS Bedrock, OpenAI) and prompt/response handling
• Intermediate data engineering skills with Python/SQL
• Security: OAuth/OIDC, JWT, service-to-service auth, KMS/Secrets Manager
• Data pipelines basics (e.g., batch to feature/API), and schema evolution practices
• Front end experience with React is a big plus (this would ultimately mean a full stack candidate)