Staff Backend Engineer, Foundations

Quo; Chicago (IL); Remote; USD 186,000 - 242,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Medical coverage

Lifestyle stipend

Flexible PTO

Job summary

Quo, a remote-first tech company building an AI-powered communications platform, seeks a Staff Backend Engineer to lead foundational backend work. You’ll drive the REST to GraphQL migration, shape architecture, and collaborate across teams to implement secure, scalable backend systems.

You’ll help rework authentication and authorization, write pivotal backend patterns, and mentor engineers, ensuring the platform scales with growing customer demand.

Qualifications

• Proficient in TypeScript and strong understanding of its type system.
• Production experience with GraphQL APIs and API modernization.
• Solid grasp of systems design, reliability and infrastructure.

Responsibilities

• Lead REST to GraphQL migration work and patterns.
• Shape GraphQL architecture with supergraphs and subgraphs.
• Rework authentication/authorization across teams and write code with them.
• Build reusable backend libraries and patterns used by product engineers.
• Design scalable backend systems and ensure reliability as usage grows.
• Set technical direction for foundational work (search to API design).
• Mentor engineers on Foundations and across the organization.

Skills

TypeScript

GraphQL

Backend engineering

Systems design

Shared libraries

Ownership

Job description

Small businesses represent 99.9% of all companies, yet they're still forced to choose between clunky, outdated enterprise phone systems or their personal phones. This multi-billion dollar market has been overlooked for decades, left to cobble together solutions that slow them down instead of helping them grow.

Quo is changing that. We bring calls, texts, and customer information together into one easy-to-use, AI-powered platform. We're not just building a phone system. We're setting a new standard for how businesses connect with their customers.

Driven by our values, we move fast, build with determination, and obsess over delivering value to the businesses that have been underserved for far too long.

Today, Quo is trusted by more than 120,000 companies and rated #1 in customer satisfaction on G2. We're backed by Y Combinator, Tiger Global, Craft Ventures, Slow Ventures, and other top-tier investors. It's safe to say we're onto something big.

About The Role

Our Foundations team sits between the cloud infrastructure and the product teams who build features. We build the patterns, libraries and backend capabilities the rest of Quo engineering builds on. When a change touches every team, it usually starts here.

Right now that means leading our move from REST to GraphQL. Foundations is doing the first big pieces of the migration and creating the patterns and tools so every other team can finish their part on their own. After that, the work moves to whatever matters most across the org, like reworking how authentication and authorization work at Quo, or rethinking how we do search.

As a Staff Backend Engineer, you'll be hands-on and writing production code, working closely with the Foundations lead. You'll stay on one team but spend a lot of your time alongside other teams, helping them adopt a new pattern, writing code with them and making sure it works for their part of the product. This isn't a feature team role, and it isn't DevOps or SRE either. It's backend engineering whose impact shows up across the whole of Quo.

Some Of The Things You’ll Do

• Lead the technical work on our REST to GraphQL migration, building the core pieces yourself and the patterns that let every other team finish theirs.
• Shape how our GraphQL architecture grows, including breaking one large graph into supergraphs and subgraphs that teams can own and change independently.
• Help rework authentication and authorization across Quo, working directly with each team it touches and writing code alongside them.
• Build reusable libraries and backend patterns that product engineers use every day as they ship features.
• Design reliable, scalable backend systems that hold up as more and more businesses run on Quo.
• Set technical direction for foundational work, from search to API design, and bring other teams along through design docs, reviews and pairing.
• Mentor engineers on Foundations and across the org, raising the bar for how backend work gets done at Quo.

Tech Stack & Tools

• Node and TypeScript on the backend
• Event-driven microservices with Temporal and RabbitMQ at the centre
• Kubernetes on AWS
• Postgres, MongoDB, Elasticsearch and Redis
• Datadog for observability
• Web (React), iOS and Android clients on the other side of the API

Language is not a filter. If you've built the right things in Go, Python, Java or anything else, we'd rather talk to you than to someone who knows Node but hasn't.

About You

• You write TypeScript every day and know it deeply. You're comfortable with its type system and the patterns that keep a large codebase healthy.
• You've built and run GraphQL APIs in production, and ideally you've helped move a codebase from REST to GraphQL or led a similar API modernisation.
• You're a strong backend engineer with a solid grasp of systems design, reliability and infrastructure, and you've built systems that scale.
• You enjoy building things other engineers depend on, like shared libraries, patterns and platform capabilities, and you care about making them easy to use.
• You can influence technical direction across teams, explain trade-offs clearly and get people on board without needing authority over them.
• You like ownership and some ambiguity. You've worked somewhere with real users and real structure, whether that's a larger tech company or a scaling startup, and you want to make a visible difference here.
• You're happiest writing code. This is a hands-on role, not a DevOps, SRE or developer productivity programme role.

Bonus Points If You

• Have worked on authentication and authorization, search or graph architecture.
• Have production and/or operational experience with GraphQL federation.
• Have worked across web, mobile and backend, even though this role is backend first.

Compensation

The annual base salary range for this position is as follows, plus equity and benefits:

• SF Bay Area, Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland, Boston, New York, and Washington, DC Metro: $205,000 - $242,000 USD
• All other US Locations: $186,000 - $217,000 USD
• Canada: $189,000 - $222,000 CAD

The ranges displayed reflect the target for new hire salaries, and within each range, individual pay is determined by your skills and experience, as well as relevant education. Your recruiter can share more and answer questions about the specific salary range during the hiring process.

Salary is just one component of Quo’s total compensation package. Your total rewards package will include equity, extensive medical coverage, a monthly lifestyle stipend, and a flexible PTO policy.

Who we are

We're a remote-first company with a culture of trust, autonomy, and action. As we rapidly grow, we're intentionally building communities in a handful of hub cities while continuing to hire great talent wherever they happen to live. If you're looking for a place to do your best work, we'd love to hear from you.

And remember, there's no such thing as a 'perfect' candidate. We're looking for optimists with grit and determination, who are excited to face the challenges of a growing startup. Quo is the type of company where you can grow, and we encourage you to apply for this role even if you don't think you meet all the requirements.

We are committed to creating an inclusive and diverse work environment. It is important that you are able to bring your authentic self to work every day. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status. #PostLI