Staff Backend Engineer: GraphQL Platform Architect

Quo; California; Remote; USD 186,000 - 217,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Medical coverage

Lifestyle stipend

Remote-first culture

Job summary

Quo, a remote-first platform trusted by thousands, is seeking a Staff Backend Engineer to advance our Foundations team. You’ll drive the REST to GraphQL migration, define scalable patterns, and mentor engineers across the organization.

This role is hands-on, collaborating with multiple teams to ensure robust backend capabilities that power the entire product. You’ll work on authentication and authorization, search architecture, and API design, shaping foundational systems used by the whole

Qualifications

• You write TypeScript every day and know its type system and patterns that keep a large codebase healthy.
• You've built and run GraphQL APIs in production, and ideally 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 scalable systems.
• 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.
• You like ownership and some ambiguity. You’ve worked somewhere with real users and real structure, and you want to make a visible difference here.
• You’re happiest writing code. This is a hands-on role, not a DevOps or developer productivity programme role.

Responsibilities

• Lead the REST to GraphQL migration, building core pieces and patterns for teams to finish theirs.
• Shape GraphQL architecture by breaking a large graph into supergraphs and subgraphs.
• Rework authentication and authorization across Quo, collaborating with each team.
• Build reusable libraries and backend patterns used by product engineers daily.
• Design reliable, scalable backend systems supporting more businesses on Quo.
• Set technical direction for foundational work across search, API design, and bring teams along with docs and reviews.
• Mentor engineers on Foundations and across the org to raise backend standards.

Skills

TypeScript

GraphQL APIs

Backend design

Systems reliability

Cross-team collaboration

Tools

Temporal

RabbitMQ

Kubernetes

Postgres

MongoDB

Elasticsearch

Job description

Quo, a remote-first platform trusted by thousands, is seeking a Staff Backend Engineer to advance our Foundations team. You’ll drive the REST to GraphQL migration, define scalable patterns, and mentor engineers across the organization.

This role is hands-on, collaborating with multiple teams to ensure robust backend capabilities that power the entire product. You’ll work on authentication and authorization, search architecture, and API design, shaping foundational systems used by the whole