Intermediate Backend Engineer

Job description

About this role

Innovative Culture: You’ll use AI as a genuine part of daily engineering work, developing the judgment to know when to trust it and when not to. Autonomy: You’ll thrive in our remote-first, asynchronous organization, where clear written communication and self-direction are the pillars of success. User-Centric Collaboration: You’ll partner closely with PMs and designers to shape requirements, so you understand why you’re building something, not just what.

Responsibilities

• Own and Ship Features: Design, implement, test, and ship backend features and improvements with minimal guidance, working in Ruby/Rails, Go, or any other modern languages.
• Build for Production: Write maintainable, secure, observable, and performant code. Design and maintain APIs, background jobs, integrations, and bounded service functionality, and work with data models, migrations, indexes, and query behavior.
• Test and Review: Add and improve automated coverage — unit, integration, contract, and end-to-end where appropriate — and review others’ code for correctness, maintainability, security, performance, and operational risk.
• Operate What You Build: Investigate build, test, deployment, and runtime failures at the feature boundary, identify technical debt and propose practical improvements, and take part in on-call or operational support where your team’s ownership model requires it.
• Leverage AI: Use AI productively in daily work, validate what it produces, and understand where its limitations matter.

Qualifications and requirements

• Backend Fundamentals: Professional experience building and shipping production backend applications, with strong programming, API, database, testing, debugging, and performance fundamentals.
• Adaptability: Experience with Ruby/Rails, Go, or any other modern backend language. We value the ability to learn and adapt over mastery of a single language.
• Feature Ownership: The ability to take a feature from clarification through delivery and follow-up, working independently while seeking input at the right time.
• Practical Judgment: Sound instincts about security, reliability, performance, maintainability, and operational risk, plus an understanding of modular backend boundaries and the consequences of coupling.
• Clear Communication: Strong written communication and effective collaboration in a remote, asynchronous environment.
• AI Fluency: Practical experience with AI coding tools, including the ability to review and correct what they generate.
• Production Go services, APIs, concurrency, profiling, or gRPC.
• Docker, Kubernetes, Helm, CI/CD, or cloud deployment.
• Rust, particularly for systems, security, performance, or platform work.
• PostgreSQL, schema evolution, caching, queues, messaging, or event-driven workflows.
• Observability using metrics, logs, traces, dashboards, and alerts.
• Contributing to a modular monolith, bounded context, shared component, or independently operated service.