
Senior Software Developer, Backend
Sketchy
full-time
Posted on:
Location Type: Remote
Location: California • Colorado • United 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