Senior Backend Engineer

The Role

We are looking for a Senior Backend Engineer to join our team that owns the end-to-end shopping experience focused on Subscriptions. You’ll work on every aspect of our customer journey, from product discovery to becoming a subscriber to engaging with our rich, stage-based parent education platform. You will own the e-commerce platform spanning account and subscription management, checkout, fulfillment, our content CMS, and more. You will do it all with a platform focus in mind - scaling our global audience to millions of customers and continuously looking for opportunities to enhance our technology, increase velocity, and maintain a high-quality bar. You will have genuine influence over technical direction, tooling choices, and the standards we build on.

What You’ll Do

• Architect, develop, and optimize the backend services and APIs that drive our global e-commerce and digital parent experiences.
• Create scalable data models and systems designed to evolve in tandem with our product roadmap and an expanding global audience.
• Partner with Product, Design, and Frontend teams to ship impactful features that support every stage of the customer journey.
• Own the security, reliability, and performance of our backend stack, ensuring a seamless experience for millions of parents.
• Guide technical direction by evaluating new vendors and platforms, weighing the benefits of internal builds versus third-party integrations.
• Champion engineering excellence by refining technical standards, development workflows, and team-wide best practices.
• Leverage AI coding tooling and AI-assisted workflows to accelerate development while maintaining a high quality bar and sound engineering judgment.
• Iterate on our CI/CD pipelines and cloud infrastructure to ensure consistent, high-velocity software delivery.
• Foster a collaborative culture through mentorship, knowledge sharing, and a shared commitment to our mission.

What We’re Looking For

• Required:
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related field.
• 5-7 years of experience with Ruby on Rails, Python, or equivalent server-side programming languages, and some professional experience with JavaScript, Swift, Java/Kotlin, or other client-side programming languages (with a personal methodology to learn new languages)
• Strong proficiency in Ruby on Rails and SQL
• Hands-on experience with AWS or comparable cloud infrastructure
• Familiarity with caching, queuing, and search tools such as Redis, RabbitMQ, or Elasticsearch
• Comfort with Docker, microservices, and containerized architectures
• Experience writing automated tests and working with CI/CD pipelines
• Clear written and verbal communication; strong collaborator and self-starter
• Nice to Have:
• Experience with NoSQL databases and data modeling for analytics or BI
• Strong understanding of the strengths and limitations of AI-assisted software development, including when to rely on generated solutions and when deeper engineering analysis is required.
• Background in consumer subscription or e-commerce platforms
• JavaScript familiarity for occasional full-stack collaboration
• Passion for early childhood development and empathy for parents as product users

Required

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related field.
• 5-7 years of experience with Ruby on Rails, Python, or equivalent server-side programming languages, and some professional experience with JavaScript, Swift, Java/Kotlin, or other client-side programming languages (with a personal methodology to learn new languages)
• Strong proficiency in Ruby on Rails and SQL
• Hands-on experience with AWS or comparable cloud infrastructure
• Familiarity with caching, queuing, and search tools such as Redis, RabbitMQ, or Elasticsearch
• Comfort with Docker, microservices, and containerized architectures
• Experience writing automated tests and working with CI/CD pipelines
• Clear written and verbal communication; strong collaborator and self-starter

Nice to Have

• Experience with NoSQL databases and data modeling for analytics or BI
• Strong understanding of the strengths and limitations of AI-assisted software development, including when to rely on generated solutions and when deeper engineering analysis is required.
• Background in consumer subscription or e-commerce platforms
• JavaScript familiarity for occasional full-stack collaboration
• Passion for early childhood development and empathy for parents as product users