Job description
Senior Backend Engineer (DevTools)
$160,000 - $260,000 + Equity + Benefits + Training + PTO
United States - Remote
Are you looking to work on genuinely hard distributed systems problems, own critical infrastructure decisions from day one, and build open-source technology that thousands of developers depend on, all while working remotely with deep technical autonomy?
The team is developing a source-available sync engine that bridges client-side SQLite with backend databases (Postgres, MongoDB, MySQL), allowing developers to build responsive, offline-capable software without wrestling with network complexity or inconsistent state. The system is already trusted in production environments handling large-scale datasets and complex replication topologies across diverse database ecosystems.
To support rapid adoption and global deployments, the company is seeking a Senior Backend Engineer with deep database expertise to strengthen and scale the server-side sync engine. You'll focus on performance, reliability, fault tolerance, and high-volume data flows-working at the intersection of backend engineering, distributed systems, and database internals.
As a senior member of the engineering team, you'll own major backend initiatives, optimize large-scale workloads, enhance protocol-level behavior, and collaborate closely with open-source contributors and database experts. You'll have direct influence over core infrastructure used by a growing developer community, with the autonomy to drive architectural decisions and shape the technical roadmap.
If you're looking for a role that combines systems-level engineering, distributed data challenges, and impactful open-source work-this is an outstanding opportunity.
The Role
- Architect and implement scalable backend systems for high-concurrency sync workloads
- Own engineering initiatives end-to-end: design, implement, deploy, and support
- Improve and extend the core sync protocol at a systems-engineering level
- Build fault-tolerant mechanisms: failover, retries, monitoring, and resilience
- Optimize Postgres and MongoDB performance: query tuning, indexing, replication, throughput
- Lead backend database modules, resolving CDC buffer overflows, consistency gaps, and DB-specific edge cases
- Contribute production code across the monorepo: services, libraries, and microservices
- Collaborate with open-source contributors and database specialists
- Expand test coverage and support containerized deployments
- Every other Friday is a day off, and the remaining Friday's can be spent working on relevant personal projects
The Person
- 7+ years backend engineering, with 4+ years in database-heavy or data-intensive systems
- Expert-level Postgres and/or MongoDB: optimization, partitioning, replication, profiling
- Strong proficiency in Node.js and TypeScript
- Hands-on with distributed systems, microservices, and container orchestration (Kubernetes, Pulumi)
- Deep understanding of real-time streaming, sync protocols, and consistency models
- Proven debugging and performance-tuning skills (Prometheus, Grafana, DB monitoring tools)
- Excellent communicator comfortable with open-source collaboration
- Passionate about reliability, correctness, and building systems that scale
