Senior Backend Engineer

Job Description

Location: Remote (US); Central to Pacific time zones preferred

Salary: $152,000 - $170,000 plus 10% bonus

Sniffies is a location-based, interactive web app designed to help gay, bi, and curious individuals connect in a safe, judgment-free environment. Using an innovative map interface, users can discover nearby individuals and popular meetup spots and join live video chats. The platform is accessible on any device with a browser, so users can engage without downloads. Sniffies fosters an open, team-driven culture that focuses on creativity, collaboration, and a commitment to positively impacting the community.

About the Role

Sniffies is growing its engineering team in the US, and this is a senior hire into our product engineering team. As Senior Backend Engineer, you will build and run the systems behind a platform with around 3 million monthly users and 20 million messages a day.

Our backend is built in Node.js and TypeScript on AWS, with MongoDB as our primary database. It powers location-based discovery on the live map, real-time messaging, subscriptions, ads, analytics, and the privacy-sensitive workflows our users rely on every day. We are also rolling out ScyllaDB as a new database layer alongside MongoDB, so you will help shape how data is modeled, stored, and served as the platform scales. You will own features from technical design through release and iteration, make pragmatic architecture calls, and help raise the quality of the code and the team around you.

You will join a fully remote product engineering team of backend, frontend, and full-stack engineers. This role suits someone already well established at a senior level, who moves quickly, knows database architecture inside out, and knows how to keep a high-traffic platform fast and reliable.

This is an individual contributor role suited to someone with deep backend expertise, strong production instincts, and the judgment to balance speed with quality.

Key Responsibilities

Product Delivery

• Own backend features end-to-end, from technical design through implementation, release, monitoring, and iteration.
• Build and maintain APIs, services, data models, background jobs, and integrations in Node.js and TypeScript.
• Translate product requirements into maintainable, well-structured backend systems.
• Build systems that perform reliably under real-time load in a fast-moving production environment.

Architecture and Technical Design

• Write and review technical designs for backend systems.
• Identify architecture tradeoffs and recommend pragmatic solutions that balance speed, quality, scalability, and maintainability.
• Lead complex initiatives involving data modeling, database performance, asynchronous processing, and platform services, including the rollout of ScyllaDB alongside MongoDB.

Performance and Production Quality

• Optimize queries, data access, and service performance for a high-traffic, real-time platform.
• Diagnose production issues using Sentry, CloudWatch, logs, metrics, and alerts, and follow through with fixes that last.
• Reduce regressions and make backend systems easier to understand, operate, debug, and extend over time.

Collaboration

• Partner closely with product, QA, and frontend and mobile engineers to shape what gets built and how.
• Mentor less experienced engineers through code review, pairing, and technical guidance.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of professional experience building, scaling, and supporting backend systems in production.
• Deep experience with Node.js and TypeScript is strongly preferred; senior backend engineers from other languages who can ramp up quickly will also be considered.
• Hands-on experience with MongoDB, including data modeling, indexing, and query performance.
• Strong database architecture skills and a track record of optimizing backend performance on a high-traffic, user-facing product.
• Experience with cloud infrastructure and services, preferably AWS.
• Experience with Docker and containerized development or deployment workflows.
• Experience with background jobs, queues, Lambdas, event-driven workflows, or asynchronous processing.
• Strong debugging skills across services, databases, logs, metrics, and production systems.
• Clear communication with engineering, product, and QA partners.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience at a social media, dating, or other consumer platform, particularly one with real-time or location-based features.
• Experience with distributed wide-column databases such as ScyllaDB or Apache Cassandra.
• Experience with messaging, subscriptions and billing, ads, analytics, or privacy-sensitive user data.
• Familiarity with frontend or mobile development workflows, especially Angular, Capacitor, iOS, or Android.
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines, observability tooling, and release operations.