Backend Engineer (Python & Networking) - Englewood Cliffs, NJ - W2 ONLY

Job Title: Backend Engineer (Python & Networking)
Location: Englewood Cliffs, NJ to Plano, TX
Duration: 1 Year of Contract

What we are looking for 
Async Python & Network Programming (3 + yrs) – Strong hands on experience with asyncio, aiohttp/anyio, low level TCP/UDP sockets, WebSocket & SSE servers, TLS handshake, connection pooling, keep alive, and zero copy buffering.
Streaming & Large Payload Handling – Ability to manage chunked transfer, bidirectional streaming, back pressure and high throughput data paths for real time LLM inference.
Protocol Knowledge – Working familiarity with HTTP/2 & HTTP/3 (multiplexing, HPACK), gRPC, and occasional custom protocol parsers.
FastAPI Based Backend (3 + yrs) – Design, develop and test production grade REST/Streaming APIs; pragmatic use of Pydantic, dependency injection and OpenAPI docs.
Containerization & Kubernetes – Docker, AKS/EKS/GKE deployment experience; HPA/VPA scaling, rolling updates, and service mesh (e.g., Istio/Envoy) basics.
Async Messaging & Event Driven Design – Production use of Redis Streams, RabbitMQ or Kafka for decoupled task queues, retries and back off logic.
PostgreSQL & Vault – Advanced query tuning, partitioning, PgBouncer pooling, plus HashiCorp Vault (dynamic secrets, transit encryption) for key management.
Cloud Networking & Security – L4/L7 load balancing, TLS termination, reverse proxy (NGINX/Envoy), mTLS between services, and automated cert lifecycle (ACME/Let’s Encrypt).
IaC & CI/CD – Terraform modules for multi env infra, plus GitHub Actions/GitLab CI pipelines with container image scanning and canary/blue green deployments