Senior Backend Engineer

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.

Shelf helps users passively track their consumption, connect with others through shared interests, and gain insights about themselves from their data. And, in return, users get a personal data store and the ability to provision access to their credentials and data at-will, gaining a passport to a more agentic internet. We've helped >250,000 users re-aggregate >1B data points so far (i.e. Jad watched S2E1 of Severance). Check us out on the iOS app store (Android coming soon!)

Shelf is powered by our platform connections solution: DataMover, a "Plaid for Personal Data”. Beyond Shelf, it’s now used by a select group of 3rd party apps and agents to power novel experiences.

The future is personalized experiences powered by user-controlled data, this depends on dynamic and transportable user data. We’re building a future where apps and services come to you and your data—not the other way around. See our latest paper here.

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 to accelerate our product development. This is a backend-leaning role, with a strong collaborative element.

In this role you will:

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) and we work in-person.

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 are:

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 there.

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. 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.

Screening: 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.

At this point, we conduct a short coding exercise with our CTO (no tricks, data structures, or algorithms — just some fiddly business logic!).

Onsite: We’ll invite you to meet the team! It’ll be a series of practical whiteboarding sessions and discussions with team members and an opportunity to grab lunch with us We typically break up our onsites into two separate days, to help balance the interview load. The first onsite is a system design, and the second onsite is lunch with the team, a behaviourial interview, and an API and data model design interview.

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.