Senior Backend Engineer

Parallel AI; San Francisco (CA); Remote; USD 120,000 - 170,000; Full time

Job summary

A fast-growing startup is seeking an experienced backend engineer to join their team in San Francisco. This role involves critical architectural decisions and the development of scalable backend systems while working closely with existing engineers and leadership. If you have a strong background in backend technologies and a passion for building efficient systems, this opportunity could be a perfect match.

Benefits

Competitive compensation package

Customizable work environment

Remote-friendly

Medical, Dental, Vision insurance

Flexible PTO

401k matching

11 annual paid holidays

Qualifications

• 5+ years of backend development experience with distributed systems.
• Expertise with AWS infrastructure and GraphQL optimization.

Responsibilities

• Design and develop backend services focused on performance and scalability.
• Collaborate on high-availability systems while enhancing the GraphQL API.

Skills

Backend development

Distributed systems

GraphQL

Typescript

Go

Python

AWS services

CI/CD pipelines

Microservices architecture

Incident response

Tools

Pulumi

Terraform

CloudFormation

Job description

About Us

Digg is building a human-first community network. The revived platform aims to use the very best of technology, including AI, to bring humanity back to the internet by fostering the spirit of discovery and genuine community that made the early web a fun and exciting place to be.

Recent Press

• New York Times

• The Verge

• TechCrunch

• AP News

The Role

We're seeking an experienced backend engineer to join our team and help scale our architecture. You'll be joining at a critical growth stage, working with modern technologies and contributing to fundamental architectural decisions.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and optimize backend services with a focus on performance and scalability

• Architect and maintain infrastructure to support high-availability systems at scale

• Collaborate with our existing backend engineers to distribute workload and accelerate development

• Implement and enhance our GraphQL API layer, with particular attention to optimization for high-load scenarios

• Optimize system performance through profiling, load testing, and capacity planning

• Implement monitoring, observability, and alerting solutions to ensure system reliability

• Contribute to infrastructure architecture and implementation with AWS services

• Participate in code reviews, architectural discussions, and technical planning

• Work cross-functionally with frontend and product teams to deliver cohesive solutions

Required Experience & Skills

• 5+ years of backend development experience with demonstrated expertise in distributed systems

• Experience scaling systems to support 100k+ monthly active users

• AWS infrastructure (ECS, Fargate, SNS+SQS, Neptune, ALB, WAF, Lambda) and IaC tools (Pulumi)

• GraphQL implementation and optimization (query efficiency, caching strategies, scaling under load)

• Strong proficiency in Typescript, Go and/or Python

• Experience with graph databases (preferably neo4j or AWS Neptune)

• Knowledge of message queue systems (Amazon SNS+SQS, RabbitMQ, Kafka, or similar)

• Understanding of load balancing, auto-scaling, and high-availability patterns

• Experience implementing CI/CD pipelines, particularly with GitHub Actions

• Experience with containerization and microservices architecture

• Ability to write clean, maintainable, and well-tested code

• Experience with incident response and production troubleshooting

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with performance tuning and optimization of backend systems

• Understanding of caching strategies and implementation (AWS ElastiCache, Redis, etc)

• Knowledge of Infrastructure as Code tools (Pulumi, Terraform, CloudFormation)

• Previous work with TypeScript/JavaScript in a backend context (Node.js)

• Experience in fintech, e-commerce, large scale social platform, or other high-transaction environments

• GraphQL implementation and optimization (query efficiency, caching strategies, scaling under load)

• Track record of scaling systems from early-stage to production-ready

• Experience implementing effective monitoring, logging, and alerting solutions

• Experience with security best practices and compliance frameworks

What We Value

• Problem-solving mindset: You're excited by technical challenges and finding elegant solutions

• Ownership mentality: You take responsibility for your work and its impact on the product

• Collaborative approach: You thrive when working with others and can clearly explain technical concepts

• Resilience and adaptability: You navigate ambiguity well and learn quickly from setbacks

• Pragmatic decision-making: You balance theoretical best practices with practical implementation needs

• Commitment to reliability: You understand the importance of building dependable systems

Benefits

• Opportunity to shape core architecture in a fast-growing startup

• Collaborative, low-ego engineering culture

• Work directly with technical leadership

• Competitive compensation package

• Remote-friendly work environment

• Chance to make a significant impact on our product and company trajectory

• Medical, Dental, Vision insurance

• Flexible PTO

• 401k matching

• 11 annual paid holidays

This position offers a unique opportunity to complement our existing talent while making your own mark on our technical foundation. If you're passionate about building scalable, maintainable systems and ready to take ownership of critical backend components, we'd love to talk with you.