Backend Engineer

Backend Engineer Opportunity

We are looking for a backend engineer who is passionate about improving reliability, scalability, and efficiency of mission-critical services, and who is equally comfortable developing new services or tackling long-tail problems with existing services.

As part of our team, you'll play a critical role in improving customer experiences by scaling our services and contributing to our culture of innovation and continuous improvement. You'll work closely with our backend, infrastructure, and application engineers, as well as our outstanding customer support team to deliver an unmatched customer experience.

How you'll help us win:

Contribute to our collection of highly-scalable services (some stateless, some stateful). Our services run in multiple regions, are engineered to support spiky but predictable workloads, and are deployed via multi-stage rollouts to build confidence in the correctness and efficiency of changes.

By 30 Days:

• Use your background to understand and improve existing services under the supervision of existing team members
• Analyze the runtime and cost efficiencies of our services and suggest areas of and strategies for improvements

By 90 Days:

• Lead the development of new services such as (1) a k8s operator to control a service's lifecycle or (2) a cloud storage caching layer
• Play a key role in technology evaluations and architecture evolution discussions
• Harden and productize internally or externally developed libraries and services.

By 1 Year:

• Work with our infrastructure and application engineers to re-evaluate the relationship between our backend services and our user-facing application, and drive improvements of scalability without introducing unnecessary friction

Requirements

Hard Skills:

• Proficiency with Rails (or another full-stack framework), including a strong understanding of ActiveRecord (or an analogous ORM), database schema design, and query performance + optimization.
• Proficiency with k8s and Go (or another systems language), including a strong understanding of garbage collection and profiling. Experience with Cgo is a bonus.
• Familiarity with our tech stack (or equivalents): GCP/GKE, Linux, Docker, Ruby/Rails, Redis, ffmpeg
• Experience in a SaaS or PaaS environment at our scale (currently 100s of millions of async jobs per week). Experience with video streaming at scale is a bonus.

Soft Skills:

• Curiosity-driven and pragmatic with a focus on delivering results
• A generalist mindset with the ability to dive deep into a wide range of challenges
• Resilience, attention to detail, and an ability to grind through complex problems
• Openness to disagreement and commitment to decisions once made
• Strong collaborative skills, with the ability to explain complex insights in an accessible manner to both technical and non-technical audiences
• Independence in managing one's workload and priorities

What's in it for you

• The opportunity to shape the foundational software services of a growing company
• A role that balances innovation and incremental improvement
• A dynamic and collaborative engineering team
• Competitive compensation and benefits
• A supportive environment that encourages innovation and personal growth

Why you should join us

• Opportunity for impact. We're established enough to ship instead of fighting fires and early enough that your work will have a real impact.
• Startup experience. You'll work closely with our CEO, a 2X Founder/CEO with a background in computer science and product design.
• We embrace being fully remote. We schedule meetings sparingly and instead heavily use async comms (Slack, Notion, Loom)

About the interview

• No live coding. We have no idea who thought writing code on whiteboards was a good idea but we hate it. We're much more interested in what you've done and learned.
• You'll meet the entire team. We think it's important that you get to meet everyone you'll be working with.
• No bullshit. Ask us anything you like. We've never understood why companies pretend they're something that they're not in the hiring process - you're going to find out eventually so we'd rather you know who we are up front so we can both make sure this is a good fit for all involved.
• Quick turnaround time. We know you have lots of options so we move fast usually in less than a week from start to finish.