[Hiring] Backend Engineer @Chromatic

Role Description

We're seeking a backend engineer to contribute towards the Chromatic Platform API, which powers our web app, CLI, internal services, and Storybook add-ons. Thousands of developers and stakeholders rely on this API, which powers our UI Tests, UI Review workflows, and other features—all to ensure their frontends are regression-free. Our resilient, scalable platform APIs are built using Elixir, TypeScript & GraphQL. We are using MongoDB & PostgreSQL for data storage.

Over the past year, highlights from our team's work include:

• Launched accessibility regression testing to help customers continuously improve the accessibility of their frontends.
• Updated our billing infrastructure to be more scalable for generating detailed usage reports and multiple metrics for usage-based billing.
• Implemented MongoDB sharding and background process optimizations to ensure that our systems continued to scale with increased demand and growth.

This is a fully remote position on a cross-functional team for individuals based in the mainland US or Canada.

Responsibilities

• Build and maintain scalable, reliable backend systems to power the Chromatic product.
• Own projects from conception to completion, breaking down features into discrete units of work and maintaining momentum toward delivery.
• Work cross-functionally at Chromatic to ensure feature continuity between Chromatic and Storybook and ship work that delights developers.
• Continuously improve existing systems by identifying opportunities for optimization, refactoring, and modernization.
• Participate in the team's support rotation, which is primarily within business hours.
• Stay ahead of emerging trends in frontend architecture and developer tooling, identifying opportunities to enhance the platform.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of hands-on backend engineering experience building scalable, resilient APIs and systems with modern Typescript and Elixir, with a test-driven approach.
• Self-directed problem solver who can scope work, communicate progress, flag blockers early, and make sound technical and product trade-offs independently while staying aligned with stakeholders.
• Strong opinions, weakly held—someone who pushes back on ideas to drive better outcomes, handles critique without defensiveness, and demonstrates a growth mindset.
• Clear written and verbal communicator who provides straightforward, self-contained updates with necessary context in our distributed, asynchronous environment.
• Focused executor who stays accountable to commitments, resists distractions, and delivers consistent progress even when things don't go as planned.
• Genuinely invested in developer experience, whether you've shipped tools for developers or spent years deeply understanding frontend teams' pain points.

Requirements

• Have experience with Storybook or Chromatic.
• Have experience building and maintaining a public API. We’d be even more ecstatic if you’ve done this with GraphQL.
• Have experience building production-grade APIs in Elixir using Phoenix.
• Have worked effectively in a distributed, remote-first team environment.
• Have followed a non-traditional path into software and bring insight from experiences beyond engineering.

Benefits

• Salary Range: $167,000 - 218,000 USD + equity.
• Learn more about our compensation philosophy here .
• For a list of our other benefits & a peek into life at Chromatic, visit our careers page .