Senior/Staff Software Engineer (Backend)

You should join koodos labs for the people and our mission.

We aspire to build the best team of the 2020s. Just like PayPal in the 90s, Google in the 00s, and Stripe in the 10s, we want to be known as "a place where it's good to be from." If you join us, we promise to be the best place to grow your career — with the best people you've ever worked with. We’re also working on a very bold mission.

We care deeply about helping people connect more deeply with themselves and others. And in the spirit of personal empowerment, we aim to invert the internet's data model over time and put individuals in control of their digital identities.

We’re building Shelf. It's a digital shelf that updates as you consume content online. You can control what shows up on your shelf, and see when people you know are watching, reading or listening to the same thing.

We believe that the way consumers and businesses interact with their data will drastically improve in the next few years. So we’ve built our apps on top of infrastructure that allows you to reclaim control over your consumption and interest data, and provision third-party access to it to personalize experiences without compromising your privacy.

We believe that the way consumers and businesses interact with their data will drastically improve in the next few years. Koodos Labs is building the products and infrastructure that’ll usher this shift and you'll be essential in achieving this vision.

We’re looking for an experienced, thoughtful senior software engineer. This is a backend-leaning role, with a strong application and data skew.

In this role you will:

You could be working on product-focused initiatives that impact our users, including syncing consumption data for lots and lots of users to ensure real-time accurate data; mapping between propriety IDs and public IDs, which directly power features in Shelf, building state-of-the-art matching algorithms using the latest of ML technology and postgres.

We’re early stage, so you'll have an outsized equity stake and an unparalleled opportunity to shape the product direction. Engineers at koodos labs decide what gets built and why, in addition to figuring out how.

We're NY-based (we have our own office in West Soho), with a strong in-person component, but also the flexibility of WFH days.

We’re a small, but mighty team with backgrounds at YouTube, Coinbase, Harvard, and Cambridge, as startup founders and as early members at companies like Improbable and Lyft. We’ve come together around a shared vision and are dedicated to creating important and positive experiences for cyberspace.

We're well resourced (unannounced rounds) & backed by top-tier investors, including the backers of companies like Airbnb, Pinterest, Snap, and Twitter, as well as the founders of companies like Zynga, VSCO, and Scale and the people behind artists like Miley Cyrus, Justin Bieber, Lorde, Logic, and Panic! At The Disco, and many others. Our team is advised by the founders of Pinterest, Dubsmash (now Reddit), as well as pioneers of digital marketing and market design from Harvard.

We care about building a genuinely diverse team. We are a majority-first gen immigrant team and sponsor visas — we think that’s important as we build towards enabling easier digital migration. We share the same values of individuality, empathy, reliability, kindness and humility. One big overlap among our life experiences is contrasts: contrasts between our own upbringing and the world around us, contrasts between what was expected of us and what we ended up pursuing and our bringing together of contrasting, interdisciplinary worlds.

More about us here.

You’re likely a good fit if you:

Have at least 7 years experience in building backend applications: As a small startup, we’re prioritizing candidates with deep industry experience laying the technical foundations for complex applications.

You have a bunch of experience writing scalable systems that are able to process and ingest data from a variety of sources, reliably and promptly, to power features and user experiences.

You have a strong grasp of the underlying infrastructure needed to enable those applications.

Preferred, but not required: are familiar with Typescript, particularly in NodeJS.

A data(base) nerd: You’ll be responsible for architecting, implementing, and optimizing the data that underpins Shelf, our core consumer app, and upcoming koodos labs data products. You will be building product features powered by robust and scalable data collection, storage, analysis and transfer.

You ideally have 3+ years of experience with using Postgres at scale, and an interest in using ML and AI to accelerate workflows.

Finally, you care about the future of open data infrastructure, and helping users own and control the data that is most meaningful to them.

Team: You are an engineer who wants to ship code and contribute to a great engineering team.

At koodos labs, we know that early teammates set the culture years into the future. You should be committed to the startup journey, have a perspective on what makes great code and what makes a great team — and you should care deeply about holding both code and teams to a high standard. We are an in-person team in New York and believe that being together IRL is an important part of setting the right pace, level of collaboration and culture early on.

Ownership: You have shipped software for at least seven years, and you’re ready to take end-to-end responsibility for a codebase and product. You know what makes a frictionless user experience, and you’re excited to ship code to production.

Learning: You are comfortable building early-stage products and taking action with imperfect information. The market is changing rapidly, and we need to respond to change without running in circles. You should be comfortable adapting rapidly while remaining focused on a goal.

Individuality: You bring a unique perspective to the team. We want anyone in the world to be able to use our products, so we approach diversity and inclusion seriously and thoughtfully. We recognize that bringing together different perspectives and backgrounds helps build stronger teams and products.

Startup Experience: You know that building great companies takes a lot of work. Seed-stage companies can offer some of the most challenging, invigorating, and rewarding experiences in tech — quite simply, koodos labs is different from Big Tech. It helps if you’ve experienced the ups and downs of startup life before, but so long as you’re excited for an adventure, we’re excited to have you join.

Here are some quotes from team members around what they want to see:

Day 1: You’ll merge your first PR. We want our developer experience to be as smooth as possible, so this first day is a good test of how we’re doing on dev ops. The code changes will be very minor — just adding your name to a file and merging it to the main branch.

Day 7: You’ll ship your first feature to production. We believe in learning-by-doing, so we’ll assign you a small feature that lets you run through our full feature planning and development pipeline. We’ll make sure you have support at every step along the way.

Day 50: You’ll help ship code across the backend, from services to CI/CD. As an early-stage startup, we have high-impact features all across our codebase, and you’ll be able to build solutions wherever the need arises.

In the Future: You’ll become a senior leader at koodos labs, either as a people manager or an individual contributor. We expect the early team to grow into high-impact roles as the company scales.

We lean heavily on prior experience, demonstrated ability, and references. We don’t want to have brilliant people inverting binary trees or solving riddles.

Interviews: We start the interview process with a conversation with our CEO to hear more about your prior experience and goals, and to tell you more about koodos labs. If we both think there’s a potential fit, we’ll have a second interview with a deep-dive on your prior experiences with our CTO or a senior engineer on our founding team.

Onsite: We’ll invite you to meet the team! It’ll be a series of practical whiteboarding sessions with team members and an opportunity to grab lunch with us ​

References: After the interview stage, we ask for 2-3 references who would be willing to discuss their experiences working with you. We will also likely reach out to other folks that you’ve worked with in the past, so please do let us know if there’s anyone we shouldn’t reach out to. We’ll make sure to be respectful of their time; most calls take about 15 minutes. And we also offer you the opportunity to reference check us!

Decision: This part’s on us, and we promise to move fast.