Sketchy

Senior Software Developer, Backend

Sketchy

full-time

Posted on:

Location Type: Remote

Location: CaliforniaColoradoUnited States

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Salary

💰 $160,000 - $200,000 per year

Job Level

About the role

  • Lead the design and implementation of backend services and APIs for key product areas, balancing delivery speed with reliability, scalability, and maintainability.
  • Partner with Product and Design to clarify requirements, propose solutions, estimate effort, and deliver milestones with clear success metrics.
  • Build and operate applied AI features in production (e.g., LLM-backed workflows, evaluation/guardrails, retrieval patterns, experimentation, and monitoring) with a focus on quality, safety, and cost.
  • Contribute to architecture decisions through RFCs/design docs, proposing pragmatic patterns for service boundaries, data models, async workflows, caching, and migrations.
  • Write high-quality code and raise the bar through code reviews, pairing, and sharing best practices; mentor junior engineers as needed.
  • Improve operational health for the systems you own: observability, performance tuning, reliability improvements, and on-call outcomes.
  • Participate in an on-call rotation and help debug/resolve production issues; contribute to post-incident learnings and follow-ups.
  • Break down product requirements into well-scoped tickets and workstreams, coordinating with teammates to deliver predictably.

Requirements

  • 6–10+ years building and operating production backend systems (consumer and/or B2B SaaS), including scaling, reliability, and distributed systems exposure.
  • Strong experience with AWS (EC2/Fargate/Lambda/Queues), Terraform (or comparable IaC), Redis, relational databases, and SQL (Postgres).
  • Strong experience with JavaScript/Node.js, TypeScript, and NestJS (or comparable modern frameworks).
  • Experience with Docker/containerization, CI/CD, and production deployment patterns.
  • Proven ability to design and ship scalable systems, and to make sound tradeoffs across APIs, data modeling, async patterns, caching, and migrations.
  • Strong instrumentation/observability skills (metrics/logging/tracing), performance debugging, and cost awareness (e.g., Datadog).
  • Clear communicator who collaborates well with technical and non-technical partners.
  • Comfortable in startup environments: ownership, pragmatism, and delivery under uncertainty.
  • Applied AI / Generative AI (Must Have)
  • Practical experience shipping AI-enabled features into production, including LLM-backed workflows, retrieval patterns (RAG, embeddings, vector databases), evaluation and guardrails, and monitoring for quality, latency, cost, and model drift.
  • Nice to Have: Experience building internal platforms or developer tooling; background in edtech or learning analytics; familiarity with modern privacy and security best practices (PII handling, least privilege, secure-by-default).
Benefits
  • 100% Individual Health Coverage - We got you covered!
  • Equity - From day one, you’ll have a stake in our future growth.
  • 401(k) - We support your financial future with up to 5% matching.
  • Annual Company Retreat in Cool Places
  • Flexible Time Off
  • Annual Work Anniversary Stipend
  • Monthly Wifi & Phone Reimbursement
  • Short Term & Long Term Disability
Applicant Tracking System Keywords

Tip: use these terms in your resume and cover letter to boost ATS matches.

Hard Skills & Tools
backend servicesAPIsAWSTerraformRedisSQLJavaScriptNode.jsTypeScriptNestJS
Soft Skills
clear communicatorcollaborationmentoringownershippragmatismdelivery under uncertainty