Staff Software Developer

BackerKit; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 184,000 - 235,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, vision benefits

401k with employer match

Annual Learning and Development stipend

Family-friendly work environment

Job summary

BackerKit is seeking a Staff-level engineer to lead frontend architecture and enhance user experiences. This remote position emphasizes collaboration with product and design teams to create intuitive UIs within a Ruby on Rails environment.

The ideal candidate has deep coding experience, strong HTML/CSS/JS fundamentals, and a dedication to improving usability. Additional benefits include a competitive salary and comprehensive medical coverage.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of software development experience on complex projects.
• Ability to mentor engineers and improve frontend craftsmanship.
• Experience shaping engineering patterns and conventions.

Responsibilities

• Lead the evolution of frontend architecture.
• Translate product intent into elegant, maintainable UI.
• Mentor engineers to raise the bar for frontend craftsmanship.

Skills

Deep experience building high-quality user interfaces

Strong fundamentals in HTML, CSS, JS, and browser behavior

Experience with Hotwire/Turbo/Stimulus

Comfort working in Rails views

Strong product and interaction design instincts

Job description

BackerKit helps creators bring projects to life. For over a decade, we’ve powered some of the world’s most successful crowdfunding campaigns. We’re always building the next generation of our platform, innovating, and driving the industry forward.

We’re a remote-first team of ~40 people with a diverse, close-knit team that prizes creativity, enthusiasm, and a willingness to learn. We move quickly, think deeply about our users, and care about building software that lasts.

We’re looking for a Staff-level engineer who is deeply motivated by user experience, interaction design, and frontend craftsmanship and excited to bring that to life within a Ruby on Rails monolith.

The role

This is a frontend and UX leadership role. You’ll work directly in Rails views using Hotwire, Turbo, Stimulus, and Tailwind to simplify complex workflows and create intuitive user experiences.

You’ll help shape frontend patterns across the product, and turn our powerful, interconnected systems into intuitive experiences that are fast, clear, and approachable.

This role is high-context, high-collaboration, and high-impact. You’ll define patterns, raise the quality bar across the product, and influence how the entire Engineering, Product & Design team thinks about user experience. Everyone at BackerKit is customer-facing, and we expect everyone to get to know the creators and backers that we serve.

How we build

We iterate quickly, ship small experiments, and learn from customers. We are a pairing shop who uses Claude Code, practices TDD, works in one-week iterations, and ships multiple times a day.

We are small-a agile, which means no component of our process is sacrosanct. Weekly retrospectives (among other things) help make sure that our processes evolve as we do. We value communication and shared ownership over rigid roles. As one of our most senior folks, we hope you’ll contribute thoughtfully to those discussions and experiments, bringing your unique experience to bear.

BackerKit is a Ruby on Rails “majestic monolith” deployed on Heroku. The codebase has been around since 2012. Despite that, it is relatively well-factored and well-tested – we’ve been tending this garden for over a decade!

We value simplicity, maintainability, communication, and shared ownership.

We’re a remote-first team working primarily 9-5 Pacific.

What you’ll do

• Partner with our Director of Engineering and Staff Engineer to shape technical direction
• Lead the evolution of frontend architecture (components, rendering strategies, etc)
• Translate product and design intent into elegant, maintainable UI
• Simplify complex workflows and improve usability, responsiveness, and performance
• Partner closely with Engineering, Product, and Design on solution development
• Mentor engineers and raise the bar for frontend and UX craftsmanship
• Take actual breaks and vacations - no off-hours or weekend work except when the app experiences unforeseen issues (which does not happen often)

What we’re looking for

Technical & craft

• Deep experience building high-quality user interfaces, and recent hands-on coding
• Strong fundamentals in HTML, CSS, JS, and browser behavior
• Comfort working directly in Rails views, helpers, and partials
• Experience with or strong interest in Hotwire / Turbo / Stimulus
• Preference for simple, maintainable systems over unnecessary abstraction

Product & UX thinking

• Strong product and interaction design instincts
• Experience simplifying complex workflows
• Ability to work effectively with ambiguity

Staff-level impact

• Experience shaping engineering patterns and conventions
• Strong communication and cross-functional collaboration skills
• Act as a go-to partner for complex or ambiguous frontend and UX challenges
• Ability to zoom out to systems (architecture and business-level) thinking while remaining comfortable bushwhacking in the weeds

Most successful candidates for this role have 10+ years of software development experience working on multiple complex software projects over time, though we do not have a strict years-of-experience requirement.

This role is a great fit if you

• Have deep knowledge of Ruby, Rails, and JavaScript
• Care deeply about how software feels to use
• Enjoy working across product, design, and backend concerns
• Prefer cohesive Rails applications over fragmented frontend stacks or SPAs
• Treat constraints as a creative tool

• Prefer working in React, Vue, or SPA-heavy environments
• Prefer fully decoupled frontend/backend architectures
• Prefer long periods of solo or heads-down work

Compensation & benefits

• Remote-first position on a distributed team
• Competitive salary and stock option plan
• Medical, dental, vision, and 401k benefits (with employer match!)
• Stipends for supporting creators of your choosing
• Annual Learning and Development stipend to support your professional growth
• Family-friendly and focused on maintaining a healthy work/life balance
• Awesome work environment at a company with a huge opportunity

Salary range: $184,000 - $235,000 a year

The base salary for this role is targeted at $184,000-$204,000/year for Denver and most remote locations, and $211,000-$235,000/year for San Francisco, Seattle, and New York City. Final offer amounts may vary from the amounts listed above and are determined by various factors including but not limited to skill set, level of relevant experience, and geographic location.