Close - Senior Backend Engineer - Backend Platform

Remote - USA3w ago

Remote Senior NA Cloud Computing Utilities Senior Backend Developer Backend Engineer Sentry Slack REST Full Stack OpenAPI

Responsibilities

• Fluent in observability and production practice. Telemetry, metrics, tracing, alerting, Sentry ownership, what production-ready actually means. You've been the person who made a system legible when it broke. • Opinionated about API design. You've shipped internet-facing APIs and you think about who's on the other end — apps, agents, humans reading docs — and what each needs. • Battle-tested. You've debugged incidents where latency budgets didn't hold, owned a system everyone else relied on, or carried a pager for something with real customer impact. • A builder first. You'd rather get a rough v1 in front of five engineers than spend three weeks on abstractions. • Energized by internal customers. Your users are a Slack DM away. You'll talk to them directly instead of through a PM, and you'll use most of what you build yourself. • Expand DevDawg and Spice. Cloud development environments for our full stack, paired with automated review and root-cause tooling that can approve real pull requests. Making that safe enough to cover more of our review surface is one of the team's biggest projects. • Build the paved roads for our API layer. REST blueprints, GraphQL schema, OpenAPI, realtime, and the auth and permission plumbing that every endpoint needs. Consistent patterns are what make shared utilities possible. • Modernize the backend framework layer. Web and async compute frameworks, performance, and migration paths (Flask → FastAPI, among others) — with clear defaults, examples, and migrations teams can adopt without asking permission. • Own how we see production. Observability, metrics, alerting, and the readiness bar teams meet before shipping. When the same issues keep showing up in incident reviews, you make sure the underlying cause gets owned rather than re-triaged. • Ship shared backend services and primitives. Eventing patterns and the event log, database-change safety and migration guardrails, delegated access and auditability, the internal admin framework and support-facing APIs. • Set the guardrails for coding agents in our backend. Static analysis, linting, hooks, test harnesses — the constraints that make agent-written code safe to merge at volume. • Partner across the org. Infrastructure owns the substrate (AWS, Kubernetes, datastores); you own the application layer on top. • Tech you'll touch: Python, Flask, FastAPI, GraphQL, TaskTiger, Rust, TypeScript, Kafka, Redis, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, Elasticsearch, Docker, Kubernetes, GitHub Actions — plus whatever coding agent ships next.

Benefits

• Compensation: Competitive pay plus an organization-wide goal-based bonus • Paid Time Off: ~5 weeks of PTO to start. Plus a 1-week all-company Winter Holiday Break and paid US holidays. You'll earn 2 extra days for every year you're with Close. • 80% Work Option: Work with your manager to choose between a standard 5-day week or a 4-day week at 80% pay • Parental Leave: Paid leave for primary and secondary caregivers • Sabbatical: A 1-month paid sabbatical every 5 years with the team • Healthcare (US residents): Two medical plans with Close covering the majority of your premium, plus Dental, Vision, HSA, FSA, and company-paid Long-Term Disability • 401k (US residents): We match your contributions up to 6%, vested immediately • Our Values • Build a house you want to live in - Examine long-term thinking and action • No BS - Practice transparency and honesty, especially when it’s hard • Invest in each other - Build successful relationships with your coworkers and customers • Discipline equals freedom - Keep your word to yourself and others • Strive for greatness - Constantly challenge yourself and others • Learn More • Listen to our CEO and Founder, Steli Efti, tell the story of Close’s journey in the $0-30m Blueprint. • Watch our culture video from our 2023 team retreat in Milan. Every year our entire team gathers in person to build connection, foster cross-functional collaboration, and have fun. In 2027, we're headed to Dusseldorf, Germany! • Explore our product. Check out a demo! • Our Hiring Process • We ask a few role-specific questions as part of our application process. These questions are designed to help us learn more about you from the start, so please answer each one thoughtfully. We see this as an opportunity to get to know you beyond your resume. • We use AI tools daily at Close and expect candidates to do the same. In evaluating your application, we aim to get a sense for you - the way you think, how you communicate, the work you've done. Applications that read as fully AI-generated will not be considered. • Regardless of fit, you can expect to hear back from our team with an update on the status of your candidacy. • If you progress to the interview process, you'll receive a full outline of the role-specific steps in your first touchpoint with us. We do our best to make the hiring process clear and human.