Senior Staff Backend Engineer

Skylight; Los Angeles (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 220,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive Salary + Equity Package

401K matching

Wellness, learning, and home-officeBud

Health, Dental & Vision Plans

Autonomy to set direction

Unlimited PTO

Company holidays on the first Friday

Job summary

Skylight is seeking a seasoned backend engineer to design and maintain scalable APIs and systems in a fast-growing startup. You will own backend reliability, collaborate with frontend and data teams, and drive meaningful technical outcomes for our calendar platform used by millions of families.

Experience with Ruby on Rails and TypeScript Lambdas is highly valued, and you will influence architecture decisions, tooling, and performance optimizations.

Qualifications

• Architect and maintain reliable backend services.
• Design and optimize robust APIs and infrastructure.
• Coordinate with cross-functional teams including retail, support, and data.

Responsibilities

• Design and maintain robust APIs and services.
• Scale and optimize backend infrastructure for reliability and performance.
• Collaborate with frontend, data, and product teams to deliver meaningful features.

Skills

Backend design

API development

System scalability

Tools

Ruby on Rails

JavaScript/TypeScript

Job description

Skylight is a technology startup building the OS of the family. We make Skylight Calendar, the smart calendar loved by millions of families (plus Wired and the Wirecutter). Our latest product is Calendar 2, which just launched to rave reviews. Our mission is to connect loved ones by creating the world's simplest products and services that improve family life. Our founders are former venture capitalists and serial entrepreneurs who have scaled this business to $300M+ in annual revenue while being completely bootstrapped and profitable. We get to grow a happy, healthy company focused on making products our customers love without investors breathing down our necks. Smart, hardworking people who care about making actually meaningful products love working here. People like you. We're busy inventing new ways to simplify family life and help parents raise great kids ? and we need your help! Come invent something new with us.

About the Role:

Our ideal candidate is a seasoned backend engineer with deep experience building reliable, scalable systems, and a passion for creating products and features that really matter to customers. You know how to design and maintain robust APIs, optimize backend infrastructure, and work closely with not only engineers from other stacks, but also cross-functional partners, from retail to customer support to data. We're looking for someone who loves finding simple, straightforward technical solutions to complex problems. The types of projects you take on, how you?re placed within our org, your title and compensation, etc., will be determined by your experience, expertise, areas of passion, and how those align with Skylight's needs. We love matching the right people with the right work. Experience with our stack (Ruby on Rails, JavaScript/TypeScript Lambdas, modern Rails/Ruby versions, and fast, well-tested applications) is important, and our bottom-line requirements are simple: a strong engineering foundation, a desire to own meaningful systems, and a commitment to delivering exceptional outcomes.

Requirements

• You?re excited to be part of a self-motivated and capable team that prides itself on having a massive impact per employee
• You have a track record of architecting, implementing, testing, and maintaining reliable backend services
• You?re a first-rate communicator in both code and human language, contributing to deep technical discussions across team and tech stack boundaries
• You work closely with non-technical stakeholders to design and build features that make customers? eyes light up and keep our bootstrapped business humming
• You?re great at figuring out how systems can work better and love having the autonomy to leave things better than you found them

Nice to Have

• An inexplicable love of goats, our unofficial backend team mascot

Benefits

Our competitive compensation package includes:

• Competitive Salary + Equity Package
• 401K matching
• Wellness, learning, and home-office budgets
• Health, Dental & Vision Medical Plans
• Tremendous autonomy to set the direction of your work
• Unlimited PTO
• Company holidays on the first Friday of every month (Except November & December)

Equal opportunity employer Skylight is committed to building a diverse and inclusive team. All qualified applicants will be considered without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, age, national origin, disability, protected veteran status, or any other factor protected by applicable federal, state, or local laws. If you?re the best person for the job, we want you on board!

We hire across the U.S., but for legal reasons, we have to list NY and CO separately. For Colorado-based candidates, the range being offered for this role is $ 180-220K based on experience and for California-based candidates, the range being offered for this role is $ 180-220K based on experience. Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider employment for qualified applicants with criminal histories in a manner consistent with the requirements of this law. This policy applies to all terms and conditions of employment, including recruiting, hiring, placement, promotion, termination, layoff, recall, transfer, leaves of absence, compensation, and training.