Staff Backend Software Engineer

As the Nonprofit Marketing Platform trusted by over 1,300 nonprofits, Feathr is purpose-built to help our customers unlock more results, time, and confidence. Feathr's software marketing platform equips nonprofits with the tools they need to build purposeful connections with their community and grow impact with confidence.

About the role

Feathr's SaaS platform is a critical component of the value we deliver to our clients. As a Staff Engineer, you shape the technical direction of the systems that meet the advertising, marketing, and analytics needs of our diverse customer base. In practice, you own one or more product areas. You identify the technical problems and opportunities in your areas, shape the solutions the team commits to, and build the most challenging parts yourself. The team decides what to build, and you supply the technical judgment behind those decisions. You work across the full stack, from Python services on the backend to React and TypeScript interfaces on the frontend. Engineers come to you when a problem has no established answer. This is an individual contributor role: you deliver primarily through the work you scope and build yourself.

KPIs

We use these measures as signals of team health, not as individual scorecards. They show leadership which teams make good progress and which teams need help. We do not use these numbers to decide promotions. We assess your performance against the ownership and deliverables in this document.

• Cycle time: work ships within the team's time target.
• Throughput: the systems you own show steady incremental work, week over week.
• Rework: solutions you scope hold up. Work shipped rarely comes back with defects.
• Quality: your code and your reviews stop critical bugs before production. Your review turnaround is fast.
• Growth: engineers you mentor are able to tackle larger and more complex projects over time.
• Visibility: your process and decisions are written down where the team can find them.

Accountability / Ownership

You own:

• The technical solutions for the bets in your product areas, including the technical scope and the tradeoffs behind it.
• The hardest technical work on the board, which you build yourself.
• The quality standards for your areas, including code review and testing strategy.
• Work you ship, until the bet closes at outcome confirmed. The team monitors the outcome metric for about 30 days after launch, and you handle monitoring, debugging, and fixes during that period.

You advise on:

• Bets: feasibility, cost, and risk during discovery, and how the team breaks them into work items that match the technical scope.
• Architecture: long-term technology choices, major changes to shared systems, and standards shared across pods.
• Engineering hiring.

Deliverables

• Technical scopes for the bets in your areas, with the options, the chosen approach, and the tradeoffs. These documents extend the Scope artifact from discovery.
• Prototypes that retire feasibility risk before the team writes production code.
• Working software, including the most challenging pieces in your product areas.
• Standards, templates, and examples that other engineers reuse.
• Upgrade and migration plans for the systems you own.

Requirements

• 8+ years building software that runs in production.
• Expert skill in backend development.
• Experience with our stack or a similar stack: Python and Flask-style APIs, MongoDB, Elasticsearch, and Redis on the backend.
• Scoped and shipped distributed systems that use queues, caches, and search.
• Run software on AWS and Kubernetes at production scale.
• Scoped solutions that other engineers built successfully.
• Mentored engineers and helped them advance to larger roles.
• Write clearly: your technical scopes and decisions are easy to follow.
• Built and improved CI/CD pipelines, and consider security in the solutions you scope.

Pay

Starting salary for this position is $165,000 - $180,000 annually depending on experience and credentials, with the potential to earn an additional 12% of base salary.

Benefits

• Fully remote
• Full vision, dental, and ~99% health insurance for employees
• Sick time off
• Vacation time off
• Extended Winter Break
• Parental Leave
• Wellness Reimbursement Credit
• Home Office Stipend
• Professional Development Budget
• Team hangouts and events

Culture

Feathr defines culture as the secret sauce that makes our flock members want to come to work everyday and do their best work. Like every company, we have an acronym that conveys the most important aspects of the culture we strive to have:

• Practicality: Progress Over Perfection
• Ambition: When Feathr wins, We all win
• Candor: Better communication, Better results
• Trust: Assume the best, Share openly
• Service: We exist to fix

This acronym is only as useful as the integrity of the people who reference it and believe in it. Every person at Feathr will face challenges; the most important quality is a commitment to work through those challenges with self-awareness and honesty.