Backend Engineer

Chicago on site Until 8/22/2026 First posted March 18, 2026 Last posted March 18, 2026
Job description

About yeet

yeet is built by a tight-knit group of systems, observability, and kernel nerds who refuse to accept “mystery outages” as normal. We’re a small, high-impact team with domain expertise in Linux, eBPF, performance instrumentation, and developer tooling.

We move fast, ship often, and take deep ownership. If you enjoy operating close to the metal, building tools that real engineers lean on during 3 AM incident sprints, and solving hard problems with minimal overhead, you’ll feel right at home here.

About the role

We’re looking for a Backend Engineer to help us scale the systems behind yeet’s real-time observability platform.

Our backend is composed primarily of Python micro services, but this isn’t just another “wrap an API around Postgres” role.

You’ll be working on streaming systems, high-throughput data ingestion, and async task pipelines that need to move fast, replicate elastically, and stay reliable under load.

About you

  • You have solid experience building backend services in Python, from design to production.

  • You’re comfortable with streaming data pipelines, pub/sub, and real-time messaging systems.

  • You understand how to design for throughput, reliability, and fault tolerance in distributed systems.

  • You can simulate high-load conditions and deliver code that’s testable, measurable, and production-ready.

  • You enjoy solving problems that don’t fit neatly into a CRUD API and like thinking about performance trade-offs.

  • You’re pragmatic: you know when to optimize and when to ship.

Nice To Haves

  • Experience with Kafka, RabbitMQ, Redis, Postgres, or DuckDB in production environments.

  • Familiarity with async frameworks like asyncio, celery, for task queues and background jobs.

  • Hands-on work with real-time protocols (WebSockets, gRPC streaming, event-driven architectures).

  • Prior exposure to observability or monitoring platforms, especially in high-scale environments.

  • A track record of building or scaling high-throughput ingestion pipelines for data storage and processing.

  • Experience with terraform and comfort contributing to infrastructure design.

About this role

Summary

Build scalable backend services, streaming systems, and real-time data pipelines in Python.

Job title

Backend Engineer

Experience level

solid experience

Industry

software

Location requirements

On-site in Chicago, no remote work specified.

Salary

Not specified

Management role

No

Skills & keywords

Required skills

pythonstreaming datapub/subreliable distributed systemsload testing

Preferred skills

kafkarabbitmqredisasynciowebsockets

Specializations

pythonstreaming systemshigh-throughputdistributed systems
Locations

Structured locations inferred from the posting.

Chicago, IL, USA

On-site City