Lead Backend Engineer: Scale APIs & Data Systems

Brick; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 160,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Brick seeks a Senior/Staff Backend Engineer to own backend architecture, feature development, and system design. You will work across NestJS, PostgreSQL, and secure data flows, delivering a high-impact backend that powers mobile apps.

Based in Chicago or San Francisco with at least 3 days in person, you will guide architectural decisions and collaborate with product, design, iOS/Android, and hardware teams to ship a polished, world-class backend product.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of professional backend engineering experience.
• Strong relational data modeling and query performance skills in PostgreSQL.
• Experience designing APIs consumed by long‑lived mobile clients.
• Fluency with idempotency, retry and replay semantics for offline clients.
• Hands‑on AWS experience with infrastructure as code (Terraform or CDK).
• Solid security and privacy instincts handling PII and encryption in transit & at rest.
• Excellent communication skills and collaborative work ethic.

Responsibilities

• Own backend architecture and feature development using TypeScript.
• Architect clean, testable, reliable code with attention to performance.
• Lead initiatives across blocking logic, analytics instrumentation, and device sharing.
• Manage infrastructure on AWS and observability with DataDog.
• Lead testing strategy including unit, integration, and CI reliability.
• Collaborate with product, design, mobile, and hardware teams to define API contracts.

Skills

Backend engineering

PostgreSQL

API design

AWS

TypeScript

Data reliability

Communication

Tools

PostgreSQL

AWS

Terraform

CDK

DataDog

Job description

Brick seeks a Senior/Staff Backend Engineer to own backend architecture, feature development, and system design. You will work across NestJS, PostgreSQL, and secure data flows, delivering a high-impact backend that powers mobile apps.

Based in Chicago or San Francisco with at least 3 days in person, you will guide architectural decisions and collaborate with product, design, iOS/Android, and hardware teams to ship a polished, world-class backend product.