Lead/Staff Backend Engineer (Contract - 3-6 months)

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.

As 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.