company overview
Swivel is a funded startup leading the way in automating the most repetitive and revenue-impacting tasks in the world of advertising operations. As enterprise participants in the advertising ecosystem grow their revenue or spend, there has always existed a linear relationship between the growth of spend and related human operational costs.
Swivel’s vision leads to the end of repetitive tasks for advertising operations personnel thus allowing them to focus on what matters most: the optimization of an enterprise-class media business. We harness the combined power of AI and machine learning to return significant amounts of time to these professionals while simultaneously improving yield/revenue for sellers and media efficacy for buyers.
Role Summary
We’re looking for a Senior Backend Developer who has built and operated secure, scalable and cloud native backend systems in Go, fluent in cloud-native environments. You’ll own backend services end-to-end—from architecture and implementation to deployment, reliability, and security hardening.
A key differentiator for this role: you have rich, hands-on experience using a Coding Agent (preferrably CLI-based coding agents that accelerate development via automated refactors, test generation, code synthesis, troubleshooting, and operation). You’ll use it responsibly to increase delivery speed while improving correctness, security, and maintainability, and help shape best practices for the team.
WHAT You'll DO
Backend Engineering (Golang) and Cloud Platform (GKE)
Design, implement, and evolve high-performance backend services in Go (REST/gRPC, event-driven services).
Own system design for scalability, reliability, and data consistency (caching, queues/streams, idempotency, retries).
Build clean, maintainable code with strong testing discipline (unit, integration, contract tests).
Participate in architecture reviews and mentor engineers on Go patterns, performance, and maintainability.
DevOps & Reliability
Own and improve CI/CD pipelines (e.g., GitHub Actions) to support fast and safe releases.
Implement or enhance Infrastructure as Code (Terraform preferred; CloudFormation also acceptable).
Improve developer experience: build tooling, automate repetitive work, reduce lead time, and improve on-call readiness.
Security (First-Class Responsibility)
Apply secure-by-default practices across the SDLC: threat modeling, secure coding, dependency hygiene, and proactive hardening.
Implement runtime and supply-chain controls: image scanning, SBOMs, signing/attestation, policy-as-code.
Strengthen cloud and cluster security in GCP: IAM least privilege, secrets management, network policies, pod security, admission policies.
Coding Agent CLI Leadership (Core)
Use a Coding Agent CLI daily for:
safe refactors, code generation, boilerplate elimination
test generation and coverage improvements
debugging and log/trace-assisted issue isolation
producing design notes, runbooks, and migration plans
Establish guardrails and standards for agent usage:
validation workflows (tests, linters, static analysis, security scans)
review guidelines (how to verify correctness and security of agent output)
prompt patterns, repo context management, and “definition of done”
Optionally: integrate agent workflows into toolchains (pre-commit hooks, CI jobs, PR review bots) to improve throughput and consistency.
WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR (Must haves)
6+ years of backend engineering experience, including 3+ years with Golang in production.
Proven experience building distributed systems (microservices or modular monoliths) with strong API design skills.
Strong SQL experience
Strong, hands-on Kubernetes experience in production, with fluency in GKE or EKS.
Strong DevOps mindset: CI/CD, containerization, release automation, operational readiness.
Strong competence on secure coding and operation/auditing practices
Rich experience using a Coding Agent CLI in real-world engineering:
can demonstrate how you use agent-assisted workflows without sacrificing quality
comfortable with CLI-driven iteration: spec refinement / development / verification / deployment
Excellent communication and ownership: you possess the business acumen to prioritize engineering efforts based on impact and cost, and the detail-orientation required to drive projects end-to-end with precision.
NIce-to-haves
Experience with any of the following:
Service mesh, API gateways
Observability stacks (Datadog, Prometheus/Grafana, OpenTelemetry, ELK/Loki)
Event streaming (Kafka/PubSub/Kinesis), background workers, distributed tracing
Security programs/compliance: SOC 2, ISO 27001, CIS Benchmarks, NIST concepts
Performance profiling and optimization in Go (pprof, tracing, contention tuning)
Experience leading platform initiatives: golden paths, paved roads, internal developer platforms.
WHAT SUCCess looks like (first 42 days)
You ship meaningful backend improvements and major new features in Go with strong test coverage and clean design.
You improve one or more of: deployment reliability, CI/CD speed, cluster security posture, or operational visibility.
You establish (or refine) Coding Agent CLI practices that measurably improve throughput while maintaining engineering standards.
You contribute to incident readiness: runbooks, alerts, dashboards, and agentic solutions to improve system reliability.
What We Offer
The most fun you’ll ever have in an Engineering environment. Seriously.
Latest MacBook Pro hardware, subscriptions and unlimited tokens to the latest LLMs.
Competitive salary and benefits package.
Flexible work hours and remote work options.
An extremely collaborative, inclusive, and dynamic work environment that does not work the team to the bone.
Vast opportunities for professional growth and personal development.
A chance to be an influential part of a fast-growing startup making a real impact for nontechnical users.
Literal gold stickers to track when people do something awesome.
It is the policy of Swivel to provide equal employment opportunity (EEO) to all persons regardless of age, color, national origin, citizenship status, physical or mental disability, race, religion, creed, gender, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity and/or expression, genetic information, marital status, status with regard to public assistance, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local law. In addition, the Company will provide reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities.