Backend Engineer

Backend Engineer

The Storytell Backend Engineer role involves designing, implementing, and operating Storytell.ai primarily using Go and cloud services, with a strong emphasis on reliability, security, and performance optimization. The position requires extensive experience in SaaS application development, cloud operations (ideally GCP), and backend application development with Go, and includes responsibilities such as building new features, troubleshooting, and maintaining high system availability. This remote-friendly role demands a collaborative, autonomous worker who values open communication and continuous improvement.

This role is also open to remote work as our teams are globally distributed. We are a remote-first team. Prior experience working remotely is not required, however, we are looking for team members who perform well given a high level of independence and autonomy and will establish a cadence of on-time delivery with high-quality work.

A successful candidate must have demonstrable experience in Go and previous work in SaaS application development and operations. You will be working closely with the Customer Success and Product team to build, test, ship, learn, and iterate to design robust, secure, and reliable features. You will be responsible to ensure work is designed, built, deployed, configured, managed, and monitored correctly to support the business. You will drive decisions on the correct usage of cloud resources, troubleshoot performance issues, and ensure the highest level of reliability for the platform. You will need to tune the environment for maximum scalability, cost efficiency, and security while providing a great user experience. Candidates must have experience developing and maintaining applications running on large public cloud platforms - ideally GCP.

Responsibilities

Top priorities: This is the kind of work you can expect to be doing as you come into this role — although we are all Crew, so we help each other succeed outside of these core priorities:

• Design, develop, test, monitor, maintain, scale, and grow features using Go and cloud services with a focus on the key pillars of the cloud: Reliability, Operational excellence, Security, Performance and Cost Optimization
• Write various kinds of tests including unit, functional, and integration tests
• Be productive within a fast-paced team while demonstrating individual agency and product intuition
• Integrate different components and develop new services with a focus on open source to allow a minimal friction developer interaction with the platform and application services
• Identify and troubleshoot any availability and performance issues at multiple layers of deployment, from hardware, operating environment, network, and application
• Evaluate performance trends and expected changes in demand and capacity, and establish the appropriate scalability plans
• Troubleshoot and solve customer issues on production deployments
• Ensure that SLAs are met in executing operational tasks
• Collaborate with other engineers to implement operational solutions while defining, adhering to industry best practices
• Systematic problem-solving approach, combined with a strong sense of ownership and drive
• Conduct periodic on-call duties
• Demonstrate working knowledge of information security issues and Web and network protocols and standards ( TLS, DNS, etc)

Requirements

Skills required: This is our "must" list -- skills you'll need to be successful in the role

• 5+ years related professional experience
• Passionate about automating everything
• Demonstrable experience writing backend applications using Go
• You are able to knowledgeably discuss performance, security, and user interactions within complex systems
• You are kind and collaborative
• You enjoy working remote with people from all over the world
• You care deeply about software quality and operability, and better ways of building software
• Value clear, open communication. We value thoughtful feedback, regular dialogue, and collaboration as fundamental skills on our team.
• Public cloud provider certifications are great to have
• Demonstrable experience of methods to promote the correct use of cloud platforms with multiple layers of abstraction and responsibility
• Understand why using infrastructure as code to efficiently provision infrastructure and services is the only way to build and maintain a large-scale cloud platform
• Align a portion of your day with the business hours of Pacific Time Zone - UTC -8

The ideal candidate also has: This is our "want" list -- The ideal candidate will also have these skills in addition to the minimums above, but we'd still love to talk to you even if you don't yet have these skills

• Experience with at least one of the following cloud platforms (GCP, AWS, Azure)
• Experience managing CI/CD pipelines (GH Actions, Jenkins, Argo, etc.)

What does "Great" look like for this role? This is how you'll know you're performing this job at a level of excellence

• Be able to deliver and execute with minimal guidance
• Operate with a growth mindset
• Ability to balance speed with long-term thinking
• Proactively thinking about system improvement and unblocking fellow team members
• Has adaptability & change agility — this is an ever-changing role with many surprises in store!
• Has a "User-focused" mindset.
• Knows what values users expect from our system
• Proactive in observing and leveraging emerging technologies
• Strong ownership, reliability, low ego, team enabler