Sr. Backend Engineer (Remote)

Who We Are (Mode.Inc)

Mode is a fast-growing technology company building businesses at the intersection of AI, data, mobile apps, and digital experiences. Our portfolio of mobile apps and digital products reaches 100M+ monthly active users across a global audience. We continue to accelerate growth through product innovation, strategic acquisitions, and emerging business opportunities.

Mode was recognized by Deloitte as the #1 fastest-growing software company in North America on the 2023 Technology Fast 500. Today, we are building our next phase of growth, including expanding Mode's AI and data business and developing direct relationships with companies that can benefit from the data and capabilities we have built.

Our Team and Culture Drive Our Success

Our team is the heart of our culture.  We value innovation, collaboration, and curiosity, with a passion for getting things done.  We strive to hire and cultivate the best team members and foster a culture of open communication and transparency.  We are driven and hard-working but also committed to having fun along the way.  We allow OKRs to guide us, assume positive intent, sometimes agree to disagree and commit, honor our commitments, seek to accomplish more with less, and encourage everyone to speak up as our team owns our company’s success.

You can read more about our team and how we work here.

The Role

We’re looking for an exceptional Senior Backend Engineer to take ownership of production backend systems and help integrate and evolve new products within Mode. This is a hands-on role for someone who is comfortable entering unfamiliar codebases, quickly understanding complex systems, identifying risks, and turning them into reliable, maintainable production systems.

You will collaborate closely with product, design, data, and frontend engineering to deliver features through rapid development cycles and deployment. We are an AI-native company, and you’ll be expected to use modern AI coding and agentic tools as a force multiplier in your everyday engineering work.

What You’ll Do

Build & Scale Core Services

• Architect backend systems powering user workflows, notifications, and automation features
• Design APIs and microservices built for performance, efficiency, and scale
• Quickly learn and apply new technologies as needed
• Work with high-volume data systems and event-driven architectures
• Improve observability, monitoring, logging, testing, and alerting
• Identify performance bottlenecks and implement optimization strategies
• Build distributed systems with multiple services, queues, external APIs, and asynchronous data flows
• Ensure uptime, stability, and production resilience
• Build resilient integrations with third-party services
• Work in 2-week sprints with CI/CD and strong code quality practices
• Partner with product, data, and frontend to ship features
• Participate in system design and architecture reviews

What You Bring

Required

• 6+ years of backend engineering experience, ideally in consumer apps, mobile, or SaaS, with at least 2 years in a senior-level role
• Experience taking ownership of an existing production system or codebase
• Ability to quickly understand unfamiliar architecture, code, dependencies, and operational workflows
• Strong debugging and problem-solving skills in systems you did not originally design
• Comfortable working with incomplete documentation and ambiguity
• Ability to identify technical risks and prioritize what needs to be fixed versus what can be left alone
• Work across teams and systems to integrate backend services, data, APIs, and operational workflows
• Understand dependencies between products and identify opportunities to simplify or standardize where it makes sense
• Help evolve inherited systems while maintaining product velocity and customer reliability
• Strong production ownership mindset
• Take ownership of existing backend services and become a reliable technical owner
• Investigate production issues across application, infrastructure, data, and third-party dependencies
• Identify and address reliability, security, performance, and maintainability risks
• Improve observability, testing, deployment, and operational practices
• Make pragmatic decisions about technical debt and modernization
• Establish enough documentation and operational knowledge that systems are no longer dependent on a small number of individuals
• Strong production experience with Ruby on Rails and the ability to work effectively in an existing Rails codebase
• Hands-on production experience with PostgreSQL, including schema design, indexing strategies, query optimization, and performance tuning
• Strong expertise with Sidekiq for background job processing, including scheduling, throttling, batching, and reliability patterns
• Solid background in API design, RESTful principles, versioning, and serialization
• Proven track record of integrating with third-party APIs and external services
• Experience designing, building, and scaling distributed systems in production
• Strong skills in testing, CI/CD pipelines, logging/monitoring, debugging, and performance optimization
• Ability to work in a fast-moving remote startup environment

Preferred:

• Experience building and supporting backends for mobile apps
• Experience creating internal tools or admin panels with ActiveAdmin
• Hands-on work with Shoryuken for SQS message processing
• Experience integrating payment processors like Stripe
• Proficiency using Redis for caching, job queues, and distributed locking
• Experience with DynamoDB or comparable NoSQL databases
• Familiarity with AWS services, including S3, DynamoDB, SQS, CloudWatch, and SES
• We are an AI-native team: AI coding assistants and agentic developer tools (for example, Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, and Codex) are a standard, expected part of how we build and ship.
• Alignment with our core values:
• Accountable: You take ownership of your responsibilities, demonstrating trustworthiness and self-discipline. You are consistent in your work, transparent in your actions, and communicate effectively. You follow through on commitments and strive for continuous improvement.
• Action-driven: Identify what is most important, agree on scope, execute in a timely manner, and drive the greatest impact.  You take initiative, roll up your sleeves, and get things done.
• Caring: You genuinely care about yourself and others, our business and craft, our mission and vision, and are passionate in heart and mind. You understand the importance of our team and strive to create a positive, supportive work environment.
• Curious: You focus on the ‘why,’ learn and expand your knowledge, explore new ideas, and generally make things better.  You're a lifelong learner with a thirst for knowledge and a constant desire to improve.
• Thorough: Your work is thoughtful, impactful, timely, accurate, and complete.  You pay attention to detail, are meticulous, and ensure quality work and compliance.

Nice to Have:

• Event-driven or streaming architecture
• Feature flagging, experimentation, or A/B testing

What success looks like

First 30 days:

• Understand the existing architecture, codebase, dependencies and production environment
• Build relationships with the existing technical team
• Identify major reliability, security and operational risks
• Become able to independently debug and ship small changes

60 days:

• Own meaningful production changes
• Resolve priority technical gaps
• Improve testing, observability and operational documentation
• Become a trusted owner of key backend areas

90 days:

• Independently own backend initiatives
• Drive reliability and maintainability improvements
• Identify opportunities for integration/simplification
• Reduce dependency on tribal knowledge and existing team members

How You Work

• Take ownership and deliver reliably
• Quickly pick up unfamiliar technologies and move between systems
• Think beyond the code and care about product outcomes
• Communicate clearly, asynchronously, and proactively
• Value craftsmanship, testing, and system reliability
• Enjoy learning, improving, and making things better over time

We Believe In The Following Workplace Norms

• Allow OKRs to Guide Us
• Assume Positive Intent
• Agree to Disagree & Commit
• Set New Precedents
• Accomplish More with Less
• Hold Yourself & Others to High Standards
• Speak Up
• Be Resourceful
• Follow the 80/20 Rule

What We Are Offering

• We are a 100% remote-first, global company.
• A competitive compensation package.
• We offer generous perks & benefits to team members. 
• Participation in the Company's equity and token plan (for full-time team members).
• We provide individual bonuses in accordance with our Company Bonus Program.
• Work with energetic, passionate, and results-driven people.
• Celebrate team members' personal & work milestones.
• Remote social activities, including virtual coffee buddies. 
• Bonus.ly - we use Bonusly as a way to recognize and reward team members for their hard work and commitment.
• Weekly Wednesday Get Stuff Done Days (No Meetings).
• Open PTO and generous Company Holidays (for full-time team members).
• 10 annual Wellness Fridays.

If we just described you and your perfect role, we'd love to talk with you.  We have a lot to accomplish this year and look forward to making headway and creating success together!

Mode.Inc does not accept/pay fees for unsolicited resumes from third-party agencies/vendors.

Our company is an Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) employer. We are committed to providing a work environment free of discrimination and harassment. All employment decisions are made without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law. We celebrate diversity and strive to create an inclusive environment for all team members.