Senior Backend Engineer

About the role

The Senior Backend Engineer will be part of a team rebuilding a platform for a company with an audience of 100M+ people. This role involves designing and implementing scalable, secure backend services and APIs that support consumer products at real scale.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement scalable, secure, maintainable backend services and APIs.
• Lead architecture and technical design discussions for complex initiatives.
• Own service performance, reliability, availability, and operational excellence end to end.
• Partner with product, frontend, data, and infrastructure teams to ship business outcomes.
• Drive incident response, root-cause analysis, and the long-term fixes that keep issues from recurring.
• Set and improve engineering standards and patterns, and address technical debt without stalling delivery.
• Review code and mentor engineers across the org, and optimize database, service, and infra performance.

Requirements

• AI-Native: Already using AI coding agents daily to move faster, and modern development practices are your baseline.
• Distributed-Systems Builder: Typically 7+ years in software engineering with heavy backend responsibility, designing and operating distributed systems in production.
• Reliability Owner: Led production incidents through resolution, and design for scale and reliability with the metrics to back it up.
• Pragmatic: Balance short-term delivery against long-term maintainability, and take end-to-end ownership of systems and outcomes.
• Strong grasp of APIs, databases, system design, and cloud-native architectures. Bonus points for event-driven architectures and messaging systems, operating services in public cloud, security and data-protection best practices, and influencing technical direction across teams.

Qualifications

• Typically 7+ years of software engineering experience.
• Experience with distributed systems and cloud-native architectures.
• Strong understanding of APIs, databases, and system design.
• Experience with modern development practices and AI coding agents.
• Experience leading production incidents and ensuring reliability and availability.

Skills

• Experience with AI coding agents and modern development practices.
• Experience with distributed systems and cloud-native architectures.
• Strong understanding of APIs, databases, and system design.
• Experience with reliability and scalability in production environments.

Benefits

• Equity: Highly competitive equity package designed for a foundational hire.
• Hybrid Model: Expected 2 days per week in-office (Bay Area or NYC).
• Benefits: Includes medical, dental, vision, and company-paid life insurance; company contributions to employee Health Savings Accounts (HSA); 401k plan with Safe Harbor company-matching; flexible vacation policy and paid company holidays; company-provided technology package; relocation assistance where applicable, including travel and company-provided housing for the first 90 days.