Staff Software Engineer, Backend

Description

The company provides real-time chat, video, activity feeds and AI moderation through an API, serving more than 1 billion end users across over 4,000 apps, including Strava, Bumble, eBay and Patreon.

The platform handles billions of API requests per month and supports applications with millions of concurrent users, with a focus on reliability, low latency and developer experience.

Responsibilities

• Join the Chat or Activity Feeds team as a Staff Software Engineer.
• Own backend systems that thousands of developers build products on, covering their structure and how they scale.

Requirements

• Have built high-scale backend systems and lived with the decisions you made, good and bad.
• Think about system structure, not only features, and explain trade-offs to the people affected by them.
• Have extensive backend engineering experience, including technical leadership on production systems.
• Be proficient in Go, Python or another backend language, or be willing to switch to Go.
• Have built features used by a large number of users and scaled them as usage grew.
• Have strong experience with a relational database. The company uses PostgreSQL, but any relational database counts.
• Have hands-on experience with Redis or a similar in-memory data store.
• Have built public APIs or SDKs that other developers use.
• Be comfortable doing infrastructure and database work as a regular part of your week, including Kubernetes.
• Have good written and spoken English, the team's working language.
• Bonus points: PostgreSQL in production at scale, including sharding, partitioning or large migrations.
• Bonus points: improving or redesigning legacy parts of a system serving live traffic.
• Bonus points: Go and gRPC in production at high request rates.
• Bonus points: messaging, feeds or other real-time systems, or queues such as RabbitMQ or Kafka.
• Bonus points: distributed storage internals such as Raft or RocksDB.
• Bonus points: cutting infrastructure cost where margins mattered.
• Bonus points: running workloads on GCP or AWS.
• Not every tool needs to be familiar. You will get exposure to most of them, and you can propose adding your favourites.
• This is an individual contributor role, not a people management role. Leads spend about 80% of their time hands-on.
• The company also hires Senior Engineers on these teams. If Senior fits your experience better, it will say so and discuss it with you.

Conditions

Full-time role based in the Amsterdam office (visa and relocation support possible), Toronto or Skopje.

Remote from the EU is also considered.

Hybrid office policy: candidates based in or relocating to an office location must follow the local office attendance policy.

Equal-opportunity policy applies to all employment decisions.

Benefits

• Generous compensation and stock options.
• Amsterdam: 28 days paid time off plus Dutch public holidays, a pension plan with company contribution, an NS Business Card or company bike, EUR 500 per year for personal development, catered lunches, a MacBook Pro, and up to EUR 60 a month toward a gym or sports club.
• Amsterdam relocation support, including visa sponsorship as a recognised IND sponsor.
• Toronto, Skopje and remote EU: local benefits based on country of employment.
• Series B company with offices in Boulder, Amsterdam, Skopje and Toronto, and more than 140 people from 37 nationalities. Backed by Felicis Ventures, GGV Capital, 01 Advisors, Techstars and Arthur Ventures.
• Startup pace: no fixed playbook, end-to-end ownership, and work sometimes beyond your title, with less structure and no set career ladder.