Senior Backend Engineer (Matter)

At JetBrains, code is our passion. Ever since we started, back in 2000, we have strived to make the strongest, most effective developer tools on earth. By automating routine checks and corrections, our tools speed up production, freeing developers to grow, discover, and create.

About our product and team

Matter is a new collaborative environment where design and product teams can interact directly with product codebases through AI agents. The goal is to turn design intent into working product code, reduce the gap between design and implementation, and let everyone contribute meaningfully to building great user experiences.

Our backend team builds the foundation that connects Matter to cloud-hosted development environments. We design and maintain the systems that let users and AI agents interact with live projects – from exposing running previews and managing processes to proxying traffic and collecting logs. Our goal is to make these environments secure, observable, and responsive, so teams can focus on building great experiences without worrying about the infrastructure underneath.

What you’ll be doing

As a backend engineer on Matter, you will:

• Develop the communication layer between Matter and cloud-hosted development environments, where AI agents execute commands and user applications run.
• Build and maintain the proxying layer that securely exposes sites running inside development environments to the outside world.
• Collaborate closely with AI, frontend, and devops engineers to deliver end-to-end features.
• Ensure system reliability, scalability, and observability in a rapidly evolving environment.
  
  

What we’re looking for

You’ll fit perfectly into this role if you:

• Have solid experience in Java or Kotlin backend development, ideally using frameworks like Spring, Ktor, or similar.
• Are deeply familiar with network communications and understand how HTTP, TCP, and proxying work across regions and latency domains.
• Can write robust, concurrent code (e.g. using Kotlin coroutines and non-blocking I/O) and reason about synchronization, data races, and performance under load.
• Have solid Linux/OS knowledge, including process trees, system calls, resource limits, and other primitives used to manage isolated execution environments.
• Have experience designing and operating distributed systems or developer-facing infrastructure.
• Enjoy collaborating across disciplines and exploring how AI can improve developer workflows.
  
  

What we’d love to see

We’d be especially thrilled if you have:

• Experience with containerized or ephemeral dev environments (e.g., Kubernetes, Docker, or similar systems).
• A background in secure tunneling, proxies, or network orchestration.

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