Staff Software Engineer - Backend

OpenGov is the leader in AI-enabled software for cities, counties, state agencies, and special districts. With a mission to power more effective and accountable government, OpenGov serves 2,000 communities across the United States. OpenGov is built exclusively for the unique asset management, permitting and licensing, procurement and contract management, tax and revenue, budgeting and planning, and financial management needs of the public sector. The OpenGov platform empowers organizations to operate more efficiently, adapt to change, and strengthen public trust.
Learn more or request a demo at opengov.com
Job Summary:
As a Staff Engineer at OpenGov, you will design and build highly scalable, event-driven SaaS solutions that drive efficiency, transparency, and accountability within government agencies. You will play a key role in shaping the backend architecture, ensuring high performance, security, and reliability across our cloud-native platform.
Our tech stack includes AWS, Kubernetes, C#, Node.js, TypeScript, and MySQL. While relational databases are our foundation, we are actively evaluating NoSQL solutions where they may provide advantages. Additionally, as we continue to integrate AI capabilities into our products, you will have opportunities to work on AI-driven features and optimize backend systems to support machine learning workloads.
This role is ideal for a hands-on leader who thrives in a collaborative, fast-paced environment and is passionate about microservices, cloud scalability, event-driven systems, and AI-powered solutions. You will work closely with product managers, frontend engineers, and platform teams to deliver robust and maintainable solutions.
Your work will directly enable government agencies to operate more efficiently, ensuring better services for millions of citizens. You'll influence key architectural decisions, improve developer velocity, and help shape OpenGov's technical future.

Responsibilities:

• Architect and develop highly scalable, cloud-native backend services in C# and Node.js.
• Design and implement event-driven architectures, leveraging Kafka or similar technologies.
• Lead the adoption of NoSQL databases where they provide value over relational models.
• Optimize and scale MySQL-based applications, ensuring high availability and performance.
• Own the full lifecycle of backend services, from design to deployment, observability, and monitoring.
• Improve cloud-native infrastructure on AWS and Kubernetes, ensuring reliability, security, and scalability.
• Drive best practices for API design, microservices architecture, and distributed systems.
• Mentor engineers and provide technical leadership on backend development patterns, scalability, and system design.
• Collaborate cross-functionally with frontend engineers, product managers, and DevOps to align backend solutions with business needs.
• Continuously evaluate new technologies to improve system reliability, maintainability, and developer productivity.

Requirements and Preferred Experience:

• BA/BS in a computer-science-related discipline or equivalent professional experience
• 12+ years of professional software development experience, with 5+ years in backend engineering.
• Deep expertise in cloud-native architectures on AWS, including Kubernetes, serverless, and event-driven design.
• Strong experience with microservices and distributed systems, including service-to-service communication patterns.
• Expertise in backend development using C# and Node.js (TypeScript is a plus).
• Experience with relational databases (MySQL) and familiarity with NoSQL solutions like DynamoDB or MongoDB.
• Hands-on experience with event-driven architectures, ideally with Kafka, AWS SNS/SQS, or similar messaging systems.
• Proficiency in API design, RESTful services, and GraphQL.
• Solid understanding of CI/CD pipelines, observability, and DevOps practices.
• Ability to troubleshoot complex, distributed systems and optimize backend performance.
• Experience working in an Agile development environment.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills.

Why OpenGov?
A Mission That MattersAt OpenGov, public service is personal. We are passionate about our mission to power more effective and accountable government. Government that operates efficiently, adapts to change, and strengthens public trust.  Some people say this is boring.  We think it’s the core of our democracy.
Opportunity to InnovateThe next great wave of innovation is unfolding with AI, an