Senior Software Engineer

We're looking for a Senior Software Developer who can own the technical health and growth of our backend platform. You'll be part architect, part tech lead, and part engineering leader. You won't just review code; you'll set the standard for how code is written, how systems are designed, and how the team thinks about quality, cost, and customer impact. This is not a senior IC role where you write code all day. It's also not a role where you're disconnected from the code. It's the balance between the two: the person who makes the team better while staying close enough to the code to make good decisions.

The core responsibilities for the job include the following:

System Reliability and Upkeep:

• Own the health of a production multi-tenant Node.js/TypeScript backend serving real-time messaging traffic
• Lead incident response, root cause analysis, and post-mortem culture.
• Identify and drive reduction of technical debt proactively, not reactively.
• Ensure monitoring, alerting, and observability are in good shape (we use New Relic, Sentry, and Pino structured logging).
• Work across multiple backend services and ensure they integrate reliably.

Scalable, Quality Engineering:

• Design and review system architecture decisions, schema changes, service boundaries, async workflows (we use Temporal.io), and queue design.
• Drive engineering standards: code review culture, PR quality, test coverage, and error handling patterns.
• Establish and enforce engineering practices that let the team ship fast without accumulating hidden risk.
• Evaluate build vs. buy decisions with a clear eye on long-term maintainability.

Cost Consciousness:

• Maintain a clear understanding of infrastructure costs (AWS, third-party APIs, LLM usage, DB compute).
• Actively flag cost anomalies and propose architectural or operational changes to address them.
• Balance engineering investment against business return to know when "good enough" is the right call.

Team Standards and Culture:

• Set a high bar for code quality, not pedantry, but clarity, maintainability, and correctness.
• Build a review culture where feedback is constructive, specific, and educational.
• Help engineers grow by pair debugging, design reviews, and code walkthroughs.
• Define and document coding conventions, architecture patterns, and engineering principles that persist beyond any individual.

Customer Empathy:

• Understand that the systems you build serve real D2C businesses who depend on them to communicate with their customers.
• Treat reliability issues with the urgency of a customer escalation, not a backlog item.
• Stay connected to what support and product teams are seeing from customers; let that shape engineering priorities.