Backend Engineer (Go + Postgres)
Backend engineer at a small, profitable, self-funded product company in Zurich, building mostly in Go with PostgreSQL and heavy AI-agent-assisted development. Day to day: schema design, data modeling, and debugging production issues, with room to grow into owning architecture and the product's technical direction.
- Compensation
- $12K–$48K
- Location
- Zurich
- Work setup
- Not specified
- Seniority
- Not specified
- Employment
- Not specified
- Experience
- Not specified
- Category
- Backend
- Posted
Skills
Must have
- Fluent in relational databases: normalization, joins, indexes, constraints
- Able to diagnose why a SQL query is slow and how endpoints touch tables
- Has built real backend systems, ideally in a typed, compiled language
- Has shipped products used by real people and handled post-launch issues
- Design judgment to steer AI agents, not just accept their output
- Comfortable with direct, blunt communication and open disagreement
Nice to have
- Go experience
- Some front-end ability with React and TypeScript
Full description
Compensation: $12k – $48k • 0.0% – 1.0%
Who we are
We're a small, profitable company that's growing fast. We aren't burning VC money on a pitch deck. We have real users, real revenue, and real problems to solve. This isn't a cushy job. Pay is fair, benefits are modest, and sometimes something breaks on a Saturday morning and we fix it. If that sounds like a dealbreaker, it probably is, and that's fine.
The role
You'll be a backend engineer working mostly in Go, with a lot of agent-assisted development. You'll also take on the work that keeps a dev shop running: schema design, data modeling, debugging production issues, and figuring out what we need to build next and how it should be structured.
This role is meant to grow. We're looking for someone who can steadily take on more responsibility for the technical direction of the product. That includes architecture, data design, and steering where the software goes. If you want to own things, there's room to own a lot.
What actually matters
You know relational databases. You don't need to be a DBA, but you need to be fluent. You understand normalization, joins, indexes, and constraints. You can look at a slow query and figure out why it's slow. You know which tables an endpoint touches without guessing. If something goes wrong, your instinct is to open a SQL client and look, not to add more logging and hope.
We believe you can't be a good backend engineer without this. Your models, your API, and your data have to line up cleanly, and if the schema is wrong, everything built on top of it is wrong. Expect database questions in the interview. They won't be trick questions. They will be the first thing we filter on.
You've built real backend systems. Ideally that includes something in a typed, compiled language, and Go is a plus but not required. You've shipped things that real people used, and you've dealt with what happens after launch.
You have design judgment. AI agents can write code fast, so writing code is no longer the hard part. The hard part is knowing when the agent's output is the wrong abstraction, the wrong data model, or a problem waiting to happen in six months. We use agentic tools heavily, and we need someone who steers them, not someone who just accepts whatever they produce.
Some front-end ability is a plus. You can find your way around React and TypeScript well enough to not be blocked.
Our stack
Backend: Go (Fiber)
Database: PostgreSQL
Mobile: React Native
Web: Next.js
Infra: AWS
Development: heavily agent-assisted
Who you are
You learn things because you want to, not because a syllabus told you to. Your degree, if you have one, is the least interesting thing about you. We care much more about the weird project you built because you wanted to see if it could be done, the tool you made because nothing else did what you needed, or the rabbit hole you went down and came out of knowing something new.