Senior Backend Engineer

Senior Backend Engineer

Recruiting from Scratch is a specialized talent firm dedicated to helping companies build exceptional teams. We partner closely with our clients to deeply understand their needs, then connect them with top-tier candidates who are not only highly skilled but also the right fit for the company's culture and vision. Our mission is simple: place the best people in the right roles to drive long-term success for both clients and candidates.

Our client is a fast-growing insurance technology company offering the first pay-at-your-pace liability insurance product designed to support Americans navigating financial hardship or imperfect driving histories. The product is currently live in 16 states and rapidly expanding nationwide.

The company is backed by top-tier investors and operates with strong fundamentals: profitable before raising a Series A and now generating over $200M in annual revenue. As a small, 25-person, high-ownership engineering culture, the team values transparency, trust, collaboration, and autonomy—no micromanagement, just builders working together toward a mission.

Current engineering initiatives include new state rollouts, greenfield agent distribution products, and direct-to-consumer feature enhancements. This is a deeply technical environment involving 0→1 development, complex state-dependent business logic, and high-impact system design.

What You Will Do

• Ramp up quickly on the insurance domain and product architecture by pairing closely with an experienced engineer during onboarding.
• Take high ownership of backend systems and deliver features end-to-end with autonomy.
• Architect, design, and implement event-driven systems leveraging tools like AWS SQS, Kafka, or RabbitMQ.
• Build and optimize SQL data models with a focus on reliability, clarity, and scalability across expanding state-specific regulations.
• Contribute directly to major company initiatives such as new state rollouts, the independent agent product, and critical feature improvements.
• Collaborate closely with product and engineering leadership on system design, tradeoffs, and long-term architecture planning.
• Investigate, debug, and improve system bottlenecks, operational workflows, and technical debt across the stack.
• Participate in meaningful planning efforts for complex, multi-month efforts such as core system rewrites and backward-compatible migrations.

Ideal Candidate Background

• 5+ years of backend engineering experience.
• US-based and able to work remotely with a highly autonomous team.
• Strong experience building event-driven systems using AWS SQS, Kafka, RabbitMQ, or similar tooling.
• Demonstrated record of independently shipping large backend features and making architectural decisions with limited guidance.
• Deep experience designing and optimizing SQL data models.
• Experience building reliable, scalable backend systems in production environments.

Preferred

• Background in regulated industries such as insurance, healthcare, or finance.
• Prior startup experience, especially in small and fast-moving teams.
• AWS experience.
• Experience with Node.js and TypeScript (their primary backend stack).
• Exposure to frontend technologies (not required).

Compensation and Benefits and Other Things

• Base Salary: $200,000 – $250,000
• Equity: Competitive
• Full health, dental, and vision coverage for employees and dependents
• Unlimited PTO
• High-trust, no-micromanagement culture
• Fully remote team with strong ownership and autonomy