Senior Backend Engineer
koodos labs
This job is no longer accepting applications
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Posted on Feb 8, 2025
Senior Backend Engineer
2 more properties
Why join koodos labs?
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.
Read more about working at koodos labs here.
What we’re building
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!)
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.
The Opportunity
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:
Architect at Scale: Build decoupled, resilient data ingestion and processing pipelines that handle millions of events daily.
Direct Impact: Work side-by-side with our CTO and founding engineers to shape product strategy and technical direction.
Robust Product Features: Develop scalable APIs and services that enable real-time insights and seamless user experiences.
Technical Excellence: Champion automation, testing, and infrastructure-as-code best practices to ensure continuous, reliable deployments.
Leadership Through Ownership: Mentor peers while taking full ownership of a rapidly evolving codebase in a high-growth startup environment (note: this is an IC role; if you're looking for a pure Engineering Manager role, this isn't the best fit)
Architect & Build: Design event-driven APIs, data pipelines, and microservices that decouple ingestion from downstream processing.
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.
Our Team
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.
Ideal Candidate
We recognize that the confidence gap and imposter syndrome might discourage amazing candidates from applying. Every job description is a wish list, so please reach out if this role really excites you.
You’re likely a good fit if you are:
Architectural Specialist: Demonstrated experience in event-driven/microservice architectures. You can design decoupled, fault-tolerant systems that handle millions of events daily with low latency (eg Kafka, Google Cloud PubSub, Flink, etc).
Proven Backend Expert: You have experience build scalable systems that are able to process data to power features and user experiences. You know how to design data models, work with large datasets, implement APIs, and leverage cloud infrastructure to achieve your goals. You have experience with NodeJS, Postgres, and AWS.
Pragmatic: You know when to take on technical debt, descope features, work on architecture, and prioritize enablers. You are able to use your understanding of the business and product to maximize you and the team’s impact and productivity.
CI/CD & Automation Enthusiast: Familiar with setting up automated testing, continuous integration/deployment pipelines, and Infrastructure-as-Code (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform/Pulumi).
Collaborative Communicator: You excel at cross-team collaboration, code reviews, and mentoring, ensuring best practices and high-quality code across the board.
Product-Focused Engineer: You understand how technical decisions drive user experience and are committed to delivering tangible, impactful product improvements.
Startup Experience: You know that building great companies takes a lot of work. Early-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.
What you'll do
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.
How we interview
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.
How to apply
If interested, please drop us a line on joinus@koodos.com with your resume.
FAQs
Where will I work?
What tech stack do you currently use?
Are you hiring interns?
Are you open to part-time?
Where can I find more info?
Do you sponsor visas?
This job is no longer accepting applications
See open jobs at koodos labs.See open jobs similar to "Senior Backend Engineer" M13.