Wand - Senior Backend Engineer
Requirements
• 6+ years building production backend systems, ideally for a consumer product with real scale. You can talk about what you built, who used it, and what shipped because of it. • Strong with PHP 8.2 (Laravel or Symfony), or comparable depth in another modern web stack with a credible plan to ramp on PHP fast. Not a hard requirement — we care more about the engineer than the language. • Relational data modeling at scale (MySQL, MariaDB, or Postgres). You’ve made the call between a wide table and a join table and lived with the consequences. • Comfortable across data stores. You’ve also reached for a document or NoSQL database (Firestore or similar) when the shape of the data called for it — and you know when not to. • Infrastructure as code is a default. Terraform, Ansible, or comparable. You don’t ship a service without thinking about how it gets deployed and re-deployed. • Comfortable working full stack. TypeScript in an Electron or web app isn’t a foreign country — you’ve shipped there before. • Outcome-oriented and high ownership. You measure yourself by what the team shipped, not by what you personally wrote. Ambiguous problems read as interesting, not as blockers — you’ll pick something up and figure it out. • Fluent with the AI tooling that’s reshaping how engineers work. Claude Code or equivalent, the coding-agent ecosystem, MCPs, the workflows people are actually using day-to-day. You stay current because you find it interesting, not because someone told you to. • Opinions on UX workflows and product. You push back on product when the API shape they want will paint us into a corner; you push back on yourself when you’re optimizing the wrong thing. • Strong written and verbal communication. You write a design doc that gets read all the way through. • Self-managing. You can pick up an ambiguous initiative and drive it without daily check-ins. • Experience inside an Electron app at depth — IPC, packaging, native modules, the weird stuff. • MariaDB specifically. We run it, and the operational quirks aren’t always Postgres-shaped. • GCP experience — IAM, networking, the usual suspects. • Cloudflare ecosystem, including Durable Objects, Workers, KV, and edge caching. • gRPC, Protocol Buffers, or FlatBuffers comfort. • Redis or similar caching at scale, and clear instincts for what should and shouldn’t sit behind a cache. • Datadog or comparable observability tooling. • LLM and vector DB familiarity (OpenAI, Weaviate, similar). We lean on these for Game Guide and a few other surfaces. • Cross-origin / cross-process communication (postMessage, RPC, websockets). • Consumer SaaS background, especially anything that’s had to hold up under organic, word-of-mouth growth. • PC gamer. You play the stuff our players play.
Responsibilities
• Own meaningful parts of the backend • Scope, design, ship, and stabilize the services the rest of the product depends on. Own the fix when something misbehaves at 2am. • Make the architectural calls — data model evolution, caching boundaries, where to spend latency budget, when to refactor and when to rewrite. • Work fluidly across the data layer. Relational stores at scale (MySQL, MariaDB) and document stores (Firestore) are both in the toolkit, and you know which to reach for and when. • Treat infrastructure as code as part of the job. Terraform and Ansible aren’t someone else’s problem; a service isn’t shipped until it can be re-deployed without you in the room. • Treat performance, observability, and operational health as part of “done.” Dashboards and alerts ship with the feature. • Move across the stack when the work demands it • Open TypeScript PRs in the Electron app when a feature is better wired end-to-end than handed off. You’re comfortable on both sides of the boundary. • Have opinions on UX workflows and product surfaces, not just API shapes. The best backend engineers we’ve worked with care how the thing feels. • Get into the Electron app, the overlay, or the web surface when that’s where the bug actually is. • Drive the backend roadmap • Take ownership of what we work on, what we cut, and what we sequence. The Head of Engineering will partner closely early on; the bar is that this person eventually drives the roadmap on their own. • Push cross-cutting initiatives nobody else will — observability gaps, data model debt, perf regressions, API hygiene. The work that quietly compounds. • Provide substantive code review, mentor where it lands naturally, and raise the level of design discussions when the design needs it, not just the implementation. • Bring thoughtfulness and genuine passion for the work. Contribute to roadmap decisions with an eye on outcomes.
Benefits
• $150K – $250K • Offers Equity • Upload your resume here to autofill key application fields. • Drop your resume here! • Parsing your resume. Autofilling key fields... • or drag and drop here • Tell us about a backend system you owned end-to-end. What did the team ship because of it? • Describe a time you opened a PR outside your “lane” — frontend, infra, ops — because the work needed it. • What’s a UX or product workflow you pushed back on as a backend engineer, and how did it land? • Which AI tools or workflows are you using day-to-day right now, and what’s changed about how you work because of them? • What’s your favorite game?
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