Senior Backend Engineer.
Production services, real users, idempotent jobs. You'd rather ship boring code than write a microservices framework. You like systems that can be reasoned about at 3am.
About the role
You'll be the third senior backend engineer on a five-person software practice. Your work splits across two anchor clients (one fintech onboarding API, one regulated workflow platform) and the API surfaces of our open-source toolkit. Your week will be roughly 70% feature engineering, 20% reviewing and pairing, and 10% writing.
This is not a coordination role. We don't need a tech lead who delegates; we need a senior engineer who ships. You'll have decision-making authority on the systems you own.
What you'll do
- Design and ship production HTTP and gRPC services in Go or TypeScript. Schemas first, tests second, code third.
- Own database schemas in Postgres. Migrations that don't break replicas, indexes that earn their keep.
- Build idempotent background jobs and event-driven workers. Retries, dead-letter queues, observable from day one.
- Review PRs with the kind of feedback you'd want to receive. Block confidently when it matters, comment briefly when it doesn't.
- Contribute to the open-source toolkit. Real users, real issues, real PRs.
Who you are
- 5+ years shipping production backend services in Go, TypeScript (Node), or Python.
- Strong relational database fundamentals. You've designed and migrated a non-trivial Postgres schema.
- You write tests, you don't just claim to.
- You can read someone else's code and say one useful thing about it within ten minutes.
- US-based, eligible to work without sponsorship.
Bonus, not required
- Experience with event sourcing, CQRS, or change-data-capture pipelines.
- You've designed an API that survived a partner integration without breaking changes.
- Open-source contributions to backend frameworks, CLI tools, or developer libraries.
- You've written publicly about an architectural decision and what changed because of it.
Interview process
- Application, resume + GitHub + paragraph. ~10 minutes for you, 30 for us.
- Engineering chat, 60 min, paired on a code walkthrough you bring.
- Take-home, paid, ~6 hours, on a self-contained backend feature. You submit a PR.
- Team day, 4 hours: design review, code review exercise, peer Q&A.
- Offer, within 48 hours of team day.
We pay for step 3 at $150/hr. If you turn down the offer, you keep the work and the payment.
Compensation & benefits
Salary band $175,000 to $220,000, plus 0.05 to 0.15% equity. We share comp ranges in the job ad because making you guess is an asshole move.
- Platinum medical, dental, vision, 100% premium covered for you
- 5 weeks PTO, 13 federal holidays, end-of-year shutdown
- $2,500 home-office sign-on, $750/yr maintenance
- $3,000/yr learning budget
- 10% open-source time