[Hiring] Senior Backend Engineer @Mode Mobile

Role Description

We’re looking for an exceptional Senior Backend Engineer to take ownership of production backend systems and help integrate and evolve new products within Mode. This is a hands-on role for someone who is comfortable entering unfamiliar codebases, quickly understanding complex systems, identifying risks, and turning them into reliable, maintainable production systems.

You will collaborate closely with product, design, data, and frontend engineering to deliver features through rapid development cycles and deployment. We are an AI-native company, and you’ll be expected to use modern AI coding and agentic tools as a force multiplier in your everyday engineering work.

What You’ll Do

• Build & Scale Core Services
• Architect backend systems powering user workflows, notifications, and automation features
• Design APIs and microservices built for performance, efficiency, and scale
• Quickly learn and apply new technologies as needed
• Work with high-volume data systems and event-driven architectures
• Improve observability, monitoring, logging, testing, and alerting
• Identify performance bottlenecks and implement optimization strategies
• Build distributed systems with multiple services, queues, external APIs, and asynchronous data flows
• Ensure uptime, stability, and production resilience
• Build resilient integrations with third-party services
• Work in 2-week sprints with CI/CD and strong code quality practices
• Partner with product, data, and frontend to ship features
• Participate in system design and architecture reviews

Qualifications

• 6+ years of backend engineering experience, ideally in consumer apps, mobile, or SaaS, with at least 2 years in a senior-level role
• Experience taking ownership of an existing production system or codebase
• Ability to quickly understand unfamiliar architecture, code, dependencies, and operational workflows
• Strong debugging and problem-solving skills in systems you did not originally design
• Comfortable working with incomplete documentation and ambiguity
• Ability to identify technical risks and prioritize what needs to be fixed versus what can be left alone
• Work across teams and systems to integrate backend services, data, APIs, and operational workflows
• Understand dependencies between products and identify opportunities to simplify or standardize where it makes sense
• Help evolve inherited systems while maintaining product velocity and customer reliability
• Strong production ownership mindset
• Take ownership of existing backend services and become a reliable technical owner
• Investigate production issues across application, infrastructure, data, and third-party dependencies
• Identify and address reliability, security, performance, and maintainability risks
• Improve observability, testing, deployment, and operational practices
• Make pragmatic decisions about technical debt and modernization
• Establish enough documentation and operational knowledge that systems are no longer dependent on a small number of individuals
• Strong production experience with Ruby on Rails and the ability to work effectively in an existing Rails codebase
• Hands-on production experience with PostgreSQL, including schema design, indexing strategies, query optimization, and performance tuning
• Strong expertise with Sidekiq for background job processing, including scheduling, throttling, batching, and reliability patterns
• Solid background in API design, RESTful principles, versioning, and serialization
• Proven track record of integrating with third-party APIs and external services
• Experience designing, building, and scaling distributed systems in production
• Strong skills in testing, CI/CD pipelines, logging/monitoring, debugging, and performance optimization
• Ability to work in a fast-moving remote startup environment

Requirements

• Experience building and supporting backends for mobile apps
• Experience creating internal tools or admin panels with ActiveAdmin
• Hands-on work with Shoryuken for SQS message processing
• Experience integrating payment processors like Stripe
• Proficiency using Redis for caching, job queues, and distributed locking
• Experience with DynamoDB or comparable NoSQL databases
• Familiarity with AWS services, including S3, DynamoDB, SQS, CloudWatch, and SES

Benefits

• We are a 100% remote-first, global company.
• A competitive compensation package.
• Generous perks & benefits to team members.
• Participation in the Company's equity and token plan (for full-time team members).
• Individual bonuses in accordance with our Company Bonus Program.
• Work with energetic, passionate, and results-driven people.
• Celebrate team members' personal & work milestones.
• Remote social activities, including virtual coffee buddies.
• Bonus.ly for recognizing and rewarding team members for their hard work and commitment.
• Weekly Wednesday Get Stuff Done Days (No Meetings).
• Open PTO and generous Company Holidays (for full-time team members).
• 10 annual Wellness Fridays.