(Contract) Senior Software Engineer Enterprise Platforms

Type: Contract, per-project.
Location: Remote - within LATAM time zones (GMT-3 to GMT-5)
Availability: Contractor (40 hours per week)

What We Are Looking For
We are looking for an experienced Senior Software Engineer to develop and enhance high‑performance and highly scalable backend services. While the role still values familiarity with Node.js and React, the primary emphasis is on Go, gRPC, Kafka, Kubernetes, and cloud‑native development across AWS & GCP. You’ll own the creation of robust backend services that interact with MongoDB, stream data through Kafka, and run reliably in containerized environments.

YOUR PROFILE
Responsibilities:

• Design, implement, and maintain data‑intensive Go and node gRPC APIs.
• Build, containerize, and deploy scalable Go microservices on Kubernetes (EKS, GKE).
• Refactor and modernize legacy Node.js services into idiomatic Go services, improving performance and stability.
• Integrate and operate Apache Kafka pipelines for high‑throughput event streaming, including producer/consumer logic, schema management, and monitoring.
• Leverage cloud services on both AWS and GCP to build resilient, cost‑effective solutions.
• Troubleshoot technical issues.
• Conduct thorough code reviews, mentor junior engineers, and champion best practices around testing, CI/CD, and security.
• Participate in architectural design reviews, providing pragmatic feedback on scalability, fault tolerance, and cost optimization.
• Collaborate closely with Product, Program Management, QA, and other teams to align delivery with business goals.
• Provide realistic level‑of‑effort (LOE) estimates during quarterly PI planning, accounting for dependencies and risk factors.
• Prototype emerging technologies to accelerate engineering velocity and reduce operational overhead.

Qualities / Experience we are seeking

• 5+ years of professional experience in software engineering
• 3+ years of experience building production‑grade highly scalable Go services
• Experience writing high performance gRPC and REST clients and servers including protobuf contracts and Client/Server communication
• Experience developing Kafka stream‑processing applications, schemas, managing topics, ACLs, consumers, and offset handling
• 3+ years of experience with AWS (S3, Cloudfront, EKS, etc.)
• 1+ year of experience with GCP (Cloud Storage, Kafka, GKE, CDN, etc.)
• 2+ years of experience using and designing mongo DB

Nice to have

• 2+ years of experience developing application services using Node + Mongo + Express +front-end frameworks/libraries like React
• 3+ years of experience with EKS/GKE, Helm charts, Terraform, and CI/CD pipelines
• 1+ years of linux bash scripting for automation and ops tasks
• Exposure to Redis, Docker, Git, observability stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry)
• Excellent problem‑solving, clear communication, and ability to work effectively in a globally distributed team
• Experience with mongo schemas, indexing strategies, and sharding considerations
• Experience with ETL pipelines
• Experience with CRUD operation

(*) SOUTHWORKS only hires individuals from countries that are not blocked or sanctioned by the United States, including those identified on the United States Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC).