Gorilla - Energy data applications
Lead/Staff Backend Engineer (Contract - 3-6 months)
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Join us at Gorilla as a Lead/Staff Backend Engineer and contribute during a pivotal period of platform scaling and evolution. We're building the digital backbone of the energy transition, delivering high-performance, data-intensive SaaS solutions that enable energy companies to optimize pricing, forecasting, and decision-making on their path to net-zero.
This is a contract role for 3–6 months, ideal for a highly experienced backend engineer who thrives in fast-paced environments, enjoys solving complex problems quickly, and can provide technical leadership with immediate impact.
What you’ll doAs a Lead/Staff Backend Engineer in our Platform team, you'll step in as a trusted technical leader to drive key backend initiatives, improve platform performance, and support the team through a phase of growth and change. You will:
Rapidly integrate into the Platform team and lead key backend projects with strategic importance.
Design and evolve core API and data systems that support pricing, forecasting, and analytics applications in high-load, data-intensive environments.
Make architectural decisions that ensure scalability, reliability, and resilience—balancing speed with sustainability.
Provide mentorship and hands-on support to engineers through design reviews, pair programming, and collaborative problem-solving.
Drive short-term, cross-functional technical initiatives in close partnership with Product Managers, Designers, and other Engineers.
Collaborate with engineering leadership to ensure a smooth transition and long-term maintainability after your engagement.
Contribute to documentation and onboarding/handover materials that support continuity for the permanent team.
Ability to ramp up quickly and deliver high-impact results in a short time.
Strong backend expertise, especially with Python, and fluency in modern design patterns, performance optimization, and testing practices.
Experience with distributed systems and high-throughput data platforms, particularly in SaaS or data-intensive domains.
Deep knowledge of relational databases and efficient data modeling.
Solid familiarity with cloud platforms (ideally AWS), infrastructure-as-code, and container orchestration.
A strong architectural intuition and the ability to provide clarity in ambiguous technical situations.
A leadership mindset with the ability to coach others, set quality standards, and foster knowledge sharing.
Experience in DevOps, CI/CD pipelines, monitoring, and platform reliability best practices.
Excellent communication skills and a collaborative, no-ego approach to team engagement.
A pragmatic, impact-oriented mindset: you focus on what moves the needle.
