Senior Software Engineer - Cloud (Backend & Distributed Systems)

About Vertex

Vertex is a high-growth enterprise software company powering real-time, cloud-native 3D applications for the worlds most advanced manufacturers. Our platform enables Fortune 500 industrial and defense-adjacent organizations to deploy scalable, highly performant 3D-enabled workflows in secure AWS environments, including GovCloud.

We operate at the intersection of cloud infrastructure, enterprise engineering systems, and mission-critical deployments. As Vertex scales and expands into complex enterprise programs, operational excellence and deployment reliability are critical to our success.

The Role

Vertex is seeking a Senior Software Engineer Cloud to design and evolve the core backend services powering our enterprise 3D collaboration platform.

You will:

• Architect and scale distributed cloud services that support mission-critical enterprise deployments
• Lead scalable and optimized backend design decisions across APIs, data stores, messaging systems, and microservices
• Drive engineering quality, observability, and reliability standards
• Contribute to long-term platform evolution, not just short-term delivery

This role is ideal for an experienced backend engineer who thinks in systems, understands the trade-offs of distributed architecture, and takes ownership of platform performance and reliability in production AWS environments.

Reporting Structure

• Reports to: VP of Product & Engineering

What You Will Own

• Architect, design, and implement scalable backend services supporting high-volume API consumers and enterprise workloads
• Lead evolution of our cloud-native platform architecture across compute, storage, messaging, and observability layers
• Drive performance optimization across services, APIs, and data stores
• Ensure services are production-grade, fault-tolerant, and observable
• Contribute to infrastructure design decisions in partnership with DevOps and platform engineers
• Balance performance, cost, scalability, and maintainability in architectural decisions
• Establish and enforce strong testing practices, including automation and integration coverage
• Participate in technical design reviews and provide thoughtful, high-quality code reviews
• Proactively identify architectural risks and propose durable solutions

What You Need to Succeed

• 5+ years of experience building SaaS products in cloud-native, microservices-based architectures
• Strong backend development experience in Scala, Java, or similar JVM-based technologies
• Experience designing and operating distributed systems in production
• Hands-on experience with AWS or Azure production environments
• Deep understanding of REST API design, performance optimization, and developer experience
• Experience working with containerized workloads (Docker)
• Strong understanding of data modeling, database interactions, and scalability patterns
• Experience managing mission-critical or sensitive production systems
• Familiarity with observability best practices (metrics, logging, tracing)
• Strong architectural judgment and ability to reason about tradeoffs
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills in a remote environment
• Experience working remotely as part of a distributed team

What Will Set You Apart

• Background architecting enterprise B2B SaaS platforms
• Direct exposure to GovCloud or regulated environments (SOC2, FedRAMP, CMMC)
• Experience building distributed systems using Akka (actors, clustering, persistence, or streams)
• Familiarity with event-driven systems and streaming architectures (e.g.,Kafka / MSK, SNS/SQS)
• Proficiency with Infrastructure as Code (CDK / CloudFormation)
• Demonstrated ability to optimize large-scale API ecosystems
• Experience implementing frontend/full stack web applications leveraging modern frameworks and patterns
• Familiarity with 3D visualization, CAD, PLM, or industrial systems
• Experience improving developer experience for external API consumers
• Working knowledge of instrumentation and telemetry patterns targeting Datadog, New Relic, etc.

Our Technology Stack

• AWS-native architecture (Fargate, S3, MSK, RDS, Postgres, Redis, Elasticsearch)
• Infrastructure as Code (CDK / CloudFormation)
• Containerized services (Docker)
• Observability via Datadog and CloudWatch
• Backend services in Java, Scala, Python, Node, C++
• Frontend SDKs in TypeScript, React, NextJS, VueJS

Why This Role MattersAs Vertex expands into larger enterprise and defense-adjacent programs, backend platform reliability and performance become foundational.

This role ensures:

• Scalable architecture that supports enterprise-grade deployments
• Durable API design across diverse integration environments
• Performance optimization across real-time collaboration workloads
• Reduced operational risk through strong engineering discipline
• A backend platform that can scale with Vertexs growth

This is a high-impact role for an engineer who wants architectural influence, production ownership, and the opportunity to