Backend Engineer

Backend Engineer at Genius

Genius is the leading destination for music, lyrics, and the stories behind the songs. At the intersection of music, technology, and culture, Genius connects fans with deeper meaning behind the world's most influential music. Join an exceptionally talented team of engineers, designers, product leaders, and business builders who are shaping the future of music and media. Genius continues to grow its presence across the U.S., with teams in Los Angeles, New York, and beyond.

Your Role at Genius

Genius is looking for an in-person Backend Engineer to help build the ultimate music companion. Overseeing a community of hundreds of millions of daily active users contributing to millions of pages of lyrics, annotations, and music metadata, your work will power product features and analytics on Genius.com, insights in our public API, and data exchange with our partners—with no shortage of interesting challenges to solve.

As a backend engineer for Genius, you will play a key role in strengthening our data infrastructure, helping us process, transform, and serve the music knowledge that powers everything we do. You'll build the pipelines, databases, and APIs that allow us to serve unique music insights to our fans. Additionally, you'll work to improve the stability, performance, and scalability of Genius' backend services, which is no small feat for a platform serving millions of users daily!

Please Note: This role is based in Los Angeles, and candidates will be required to work onsite 3–4 days per week, or as needed, at our Beverly Hills office, located at 131 S. Rodeo Dr., Suite 375, Beverly Hills, CA 90212. Candidates must be located in the Los Angeles area.

What You'll Do

• Build and maintain pipelines to process, transform, and deliver Genius' unique music data to partners, internal systems, and business analytics
• Proactively identify and fix infrastructure bottlenecks to scale backend services to hundreds of thousands of requests per minute
• Architect database query patterns and migrations in PostgreSQL, Clickhouse and BigQuery that scale to large tables with 1B+ rows
• Design and implement backend APIs that serve data reliably and performantly to our frontend and partner integrations
• Take ownership over the systems you build, proactively identifying and surfacing performance, reliability, and maintainability improvements
• During your on-call rotation, be the backstop for backend quality, stability, and performance. Triage incoming issues to find the most urgent problems, and handle emergent incidents to keep services online
• Work directly with stakeholders to uncover and address business needs, including product owners, end users, and other engineers across the company

What We're Searching For

• Backend Framework Proficiency: Strong experience with Ruby on Rails (or a similar "batteries-included" framework). Candidates should be comfortable working with large, established codebases, and have an understanding of architectural patterns necessary to build APIs at scale.
• Database Expertise: Deep proficiency with both relational and non-relational databases for both OLTP and OLAP workloads. Candidates should be able to design database schemas, write complex queries, optimize performance for scale, and manage migrations on large, high-traffic tables.
• Data Pipeline Experience: Hands-on experience building and maintaining ELT pipelines and workflow orchestration tools like Apache Airflow. Candidates should be comfortable with data modeling, scheduling, monitoring, and debugging complex pipeline jobs.
• Product Ownership: Brings a product-first mindset, able to drive projects from ideation to launch while focusing on technical quality, system reliability, and user experience.
• Collaboration & Communication: Comfortable working cross-functionally with frontend engineers, data analysts, product, and other teams to ensure clarity, alignment, and smooth execution of projects.
• Continuous Learning: Demonstrates a passion for staying current with new technologies, frameworks, and industry best practices, proactively applying improvements to code quality and team workflows.
• Experience: At least 4 years of hands-on experience in a backend or data engineering capacity, preferably in a product-driven environment.
• B.S. in Computer Science or a related field is a plus—but not required with equivalent hands-on experience

The base salary range for this position is $145,000–$180,000 and is determined based on a variety of factors, including experience, education, relevant skills, and industry knowledge.