Staff Backend Engineer

TeamSnap; Northern (KY); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 220,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Unlimited PTO

Health, dental, vision insurance

401(k) with company match

Learning & development stipend

Remote-friendly culture

Job summary

TeamSnap, a fully distributed engineering team, is hiring a Staff Software Engineer, Backend, to help scale backend systems and APIs used by millions of daily users and thousands of sports organizations. You will own complex backend work, mentor engineers, and drive architecture decisions across cross-functional teams.

The role emphasizes service-oriented, event-driven architectures, measurable reliability, and production-grade quality in a remote, globally distributed environment.

Qualifications

• Hands-on backend expert with a track record of shipping production services.
• Experience leading engineering initiatives and mentoring teammates.
• Strong knowledge of APIs, databases, caching, and observability.

Responsibilities

• Architect, build, and evolve backend APIs and services for millions of users.
• Own complex backend work from discovery to production and maintenance.
• Lead ambiguous initiatives, identify risks, and guide teams to clear execution.
• Improve reliability, performance, and operability of production systems.
• Debug production issues across code, databases, caches, and queues.
• Collaborate with product, design, infra, data, and support teams to deliver durable backend systems.
• Provide feedback, mentor engineers, and communicate trade-offs to non-technical stakeholders.

Skills

Backend engineering

API design

Distributed systems

Mentoring

Technical leadership

Tools

Node.js

TypeScript

Ruby on Rails

Elixir

Job description

About Us

At TeamSnap, we believe when the world connects through sports; the world becomes better. TeamSnap is a sports and communication platform dedicated to taking the work out of play in youth sports. We also believe our jobs should excite us, our teammates should support us and our bosses should inspire us. We empower our people to bring big ideas and tiny egos, landing us on Outside Magazine’s list of “Best Places to Work” and Built In’s “100 Best Remote-First Places to Work.”

TeamSnap is seeking a Staff Software Engineer, Backend, to join our fully distributed engineering team and help us continue scaling systems that serve millions of daily users and tens of thousands of amateur sports organizations. Our stack includes Node, TypeScript, Elixir, Ruby/Rails, SQL, React, cloud-based services, event-driven systems, queues, background jobs, caching layers, and observability tooling.

We are looking for a hands‑on Staff Backend Engineer who can build and improve APIs and services, reason through production issues across the system, lead technical design in ambiguous areas, mentor engineers, and raise the quality bar across the team. This person should be comfortable working closely with infrastructure, platform, and data teams without being expected to own those functions directly.

As an engineering team, we architect and build scalable systems using service-oriented and event-driven architecture. This role will help shape the technical foundation behind TeamSnap’s product experience, with a focus on backend systems, APIs, services, data performance, reliability, observability, and production quality.

What You’ll Do

• Architect, build, and evolve backend APIs, services, event-driven workflows, queues, background jobs, data models, caching strategies, and integrations that support millions of users and thousands of sports organizations.

• Own complex backend product and technical work from discovery through design, implementation, rollout, production support, and long term maintainability.

• Lead ambiguous technical initiatives by breaking down problems, identifying risks, making practical tradeoffs, and helping teams move from uncertainty to clear execution.

• Improve the reliability, scalability, performance, and operability of production systems through thoughtful architecture, strong testing practices, database optimization, caching, monitoring, alerting, and incident follow-up.

• Debug complex production issues by reasoning across application code, databases, caches, queues, jobs, observability data, and the broader request lifecycle.

• Partner with Product, Design, Engineering, Infrastructure, Platform, Data, Support, and other teams to turn roadmap needs into durable backend systems and practical delivery plans.

• Strong interpersonal skills with the ability to give and receive constructive feedback, mentor engineers, influence cross-team alignment and articulate technical trade-offs to non-technical stakeholders

What Will Set You Up for Success

• Strong Node expertise with experience building and maintaining production backend systems.

• Staff level backend engineering depth, with a strong track record building and operating high‑scale APIs, services, distributed systems, or shared product capabilities in production.

• Strong command of backend technologies such as Node, TypeScript, Elixir, Ruby/Rails, Java, Go, Python, or similar, including runtime behavior, failure modes, and production tradeoffs.

• Strong SQL and relational database judgment, including indexing, query optimization, migrations, profiling, data modeling, transactions, read and write patterns, and performance tuning.

• Practical understanding of service-oriented architecture, event-driven architecture, queues, background jobs, webhooks, Redis or similar caching tools, and systems that need to scale under real production load.

• Working knowledge of production infrastructure and platform concerns, enough to reason through deployments, containers, CI/CD pipelines, cloud services, networking basics, observability, and operational debugging.

• Strong production ownership mindset, with the ability to use logs, metrics, traces, dashboards, alerts, incident reviews, and system behavior to improve reliability over time.

• Demonstrated ability to lead through influence, mentor engineers, facilitate technical decisions, communicate tradeoffs clearly, and connect backend technical choices to customer impact, business needs, and long term maintainability.

Bonus

• Previous work in or close partnership with infrastructure, platform, SRE, DevOps, or data teams.

• Familiarity with Elasticsearch, BigQuery, analytics pipelines, search infrastructure, reporting workflows, or high‑volume data processing.

• Responsible use of AI‑assisted engineering workflows to improve debugging, testing, documentation, refactoring, prototyping, or developer experience without compromising quality or understanding.

Compensation

We’re committed to equitable compensation for all TeamSnappers. The minimum starting point for this role is $200,000 inclusive of base and bonus, with comp updated based on multiple factors. Our comp is highly competitive in our space and we adjust overall comp based on relevant experience, skills, certifications, and geographic location.

Location

TeamSnap is a fully remote company, so you need to be very comfortable working with people who aren’t in the same time zone as you. We are always expanding, but there is a small list of states we do not hire in, including Alabama, Alaska, Delaware, District of Columbia, Hawaii, Iowa, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nebraska, New Mexico, Rhode Island, South Dakota West Virginia and Utah and while we love all parts of the world, we can only hire permanent US residents at this time.

Opportunities to Grow

At TeamSnap, we work hard to provide a culture of trust, accountability, inclusivity, and boundless opportunities to grow, along with the chance to make a lasting impact and have some fun while doing it.

Total Rewards

• We’re proud to be remote‑first. We've been remote since 2009, long before COVID made it cool
• Unlimited PTO and paid parental leave for ALL parents (not just primary or secondary)
• 100% premium coverage of medical/dental/vision for you and your family
• 401K to help you invest for the future
• $1,500 annual learning and development stipend
• Travel to fun locations for all-company meetings and team events
• Generous home office allowance to set you up for success
• TeamSnap SWAG to our store upon starting and a $50 credit on every work anniversary thereafter
• A monthly stipend reimbursement for health & wellness and so much more!
• TeamSnap Total Rewards

Working at TeamSnap

At TeamSnap, you’re not a culture fit, you’re a culture add. Check out our Culture Playbook and learn how we succeed at being remote‑first, what makes our company so unique, and how we’re inspired by our people, our customers, and our values.

Inclusion and Diversity

Creativity and innovation can’t thrive when we’re cookie‑cutter images of each other. We’re quickly growing more diverse, but there’s always room for improvement. We are committed to inclusion and diversity at TeamSnap, and we hold ourselves accountable for building an environment where everyone feels valued. If you need any disability‑related adaptation during the recruitment process, just let us know! We are an Equal Employment Opportunity Employer.