Software Engineer - Backend

Morgan Stanley is hiring a Director-level backend engineer to design, build, and operate production-grade services. If you have 4+ years of hands-on experience, this role focuses on backend services and APIs, distributed systems, and production resilience using Java and Python. You will work onsite in New York, NY with a culture that values depth over buzzwords and gives room to think.

Why join us

• Work on systems with real impact
• Engineering culture that values depth over buzzwords
• Opportunity to grow into system design and end-to-end ownership
• Smart peers working on real problems, with room to reason
• Open environment where everyone can express their views and make significant contributions

Responsibilities

• Design and build new backend services and APIs from scratch
• Work on distributed systems with scalability, latency, and reliability constraints
• Make trade-offs across performance, consistency, and complexity
• Write clean, maintainable, testable code others enjoy working with
• Own services end-to-end: design, build, deploy, and operate
• Debug production issues and improve system resilience over time

Required qualifications

• Strong proficiency in Java and Python for backend engineering
• Solid understanding of HTTP fundamentals
• Strong grasp of object-oriented design, clean class modeling, and design patterns for multi-threaded and event-driven systems
• Good command of data structures and collections, including when to use them
• Hands-on experience with multi-threaded and event-driven systems
• Awareness of memory usage, time, and space complexity
• Experience with dependency injection and lifecycle management
• Understanding of AOP concepts including advice, pointcuts, and cross-cutting concerns
• Experience with transaction management
• Familiarity with connection pools and resource management
• Experience designing read and write APIs for stability, scalability, and performance
• Exposure to real-world event-driven systems, pub-sub patterns, and fault tolerance
• Familiarity with caching strategies (local and distributed)
• Practical understanding of logging, monitoring, and observability
• Working knowledge of security fundamentals: authentication, authorization, and encryption
• Comfort reasoning through problems and communicating your approach
• Focus on clarity, correctness, and simplicity, with the ability to explain design choices
• Take ownership and follow issues through to resolution
• 4+ years of relevant experience

Nice to have

• Practical understanding of batch processing and data pipelines
• Experience with BDD testing frameworks and tools

Interview process

• Hands-on, real-world problem discussions
• No tell me about yourself or resume walkthroughs
• Interactive conversations focused on how you think, design, and reason

Compensation: USD 120,000 - 170,000 per year.

Location: New York, NY (onsite).