Senior Backend Developer (Go / Google Cloud)

A client with Kforce is seeking a Senior Backend Developer (Go/Google Cloud) in New York, NY to help build and scale the services powering live event management, media processing, asset distribution, and hybrid edge-caching solutions. Summary: In this role, you will work on high-performance Go microservices, cloud-native architectures, and distributed systems that support mission-critical media workflows. This role requires strong backend engineering fundamentals, hands-on experience with Google Cloud Platform, Kubernetes, and event-driven architectures, and an interest in solving complex media and streaming challenges at scale. What You'll Do:

• Senior Backend Developer will design, build, and maintain production Go microservices using gRPC, Protocol Buffers, and grpc-gateway
• Develop services supporting live event lifecycle management, media ingestion, asset export, media inspection, and distribution workflows
• Enhance our hybrid media-cache architecture that bridges on-premise file systems with Google Cloud Storage
• Own features end-to-end, from API design and protobuf schemas through deployment and operational support
• As a Senior Backend Developer, you will build event-driven solutions using Pub/Sub, Cloud Tasks, Cloud Functions, and Cloud Workflows
• Integrate with Google Cloud media services including Live Stream API, Transcoder API, Video Intelligence, and Vision AI
• Create and maintain unit, integration, load, and Critical User Journey (CUJ) tests
• Improve system reliability through observability, monitoring, and performance optimization
• Collaborate with DevOps teams on Kubernetes deployments, Helm charts, Terraform infrastructure, Istio service mesh configuration, and GKE rollouts
• 5+ years of professional backend development experience, including 3+ years building production services in Go
• Strong expertise with Go concurrency patterns, context-aware programming, error handling, graceful shutdown, and service reliability
• Experience designing and building APIs using gRPC, Protocol Buffers, grpc-gateway
• Hands-on experience building and operating applications on Google Cloud Platform, including GKE, Cloud Functions, Cloud Workflows, Pub/Sub, Cloud Tasks, Cloud Scheduler, Cloud Storage, Cloud SQL, Secret Manager, IAM, and Service Accounts
• Experience deploying and operating services in Kubernetes environments, including Helm, Terraform, workload scaling, resource tuning, health checks, logging, and troubleshooting
• Working knowledge of Istio service mesh concepts such as traffic routing, authorization policies, and mTLS is highly desirable
• Experience with query builders such as goqu, testing tools such as sqlmock, and caching technologies including Redis, Memorystore, or in-memory caching solutions
• Strong SQL skills with MySQL and/or PostgreSQL, including schema design, indexing, migrations, and query optimization
• Experience building and deploying software through GitHub Actions, Cloud Build, or similar CI/CD platforms
• Comfortable working in Infrastructure-as-Code environments using Terraform and Helm
• Familiarity with Artifact Registry, containerized deployments, and automated testing pipelines
• Strong testing discipline with unit, integration, end-to-end, and load testing
• Production experience with OpenTelemetry, distributed tracing, Prometheus metrics, Grafana dashboards, Cloud Trace, and structured logging

• Live video and streaming technologies including SRT, RTMP, HLS, DASH, CMAF, manifest generation, and media delivery workflows
• Media processing technologies such as FFmpeg, FFprobe, H.264, H.265, and VP9