Backend Engineer
Confirmed on the employer's own hiring board on Oct 9, 2026. First seen by Alion on Oct 6, 2026.
We're looking for experienced engineers to join our backend team. The team builds the infrastructure and APIs the rest of the first-party product and third-party development community runs on. You'll work with our lead architect on the data model and API contracts, and frontend team builds on what you ship.
Our stack is intentionally boring technology and a minimal-dependency monorepo: Go, SQLite, TypeScript/React. We'd rather have one well-structured service than ten fragile ones.
Responsibilities
- Social graph and identity. Build the graph: users, profiles, friends and follows, guilds, roles, permissions and moderation. It has to stay correct under concurrency and abuse, and fast as the graph grows.
- Financial and cosmetic economy. Take point on implementing currencies, balances, drops, crafting, cosmetics and entitlements, including reconciliation with on-chain assets and commerce. Every transaction must be idempotent, auditable and reversible.
- Social product. Chat, timelines, feeds and notifications, built as reusable backend capabilities rather than one-off features. rather than one-off features.
- API model. Implement contract-first, versioned APIs, and help evolve the contracts with the architect so frontends, mobile and third-party clients can build on them.
- Raise the bar. Bring hard-won experience to design reviews, testing and code review, and mentor others on the team.
What we're looking for
- A portfolio of serious backend work you can walk us through in depth
- Years of experience building and running production systems. You've been the person others go to when correctness or scale gets hard.
- You've built something where correctness around value mattered: payments, ledgers, marketplaces, virtual economies, entitlements
- You've built social systems: graphs, permissions, feeds, chat, moderation
- Strong relational data modeling: schema design, indexing, query design, migrations on live data
- You write clearly. Specs and design docs are part of the job.
Good to have
- In-game economies or live-ops: drop tables, sinks and faucets, exploit response
- Real-time systems (WebSockets, SSE)
- Web3 identity and assets: wallet signatures, on-chain indexing
- Founding-engineer or 0→1 experience
- Systems programming (C/C++/Rust/Zig)
Us:
- Independent and well-capitalized
- Engaged alpha user community
- High-autonomy teams inside a growing org
- Ambitious Xanadu/Semantic Web inspired vision
Benefits:
- Seed stage equity
- Learning/health/culture stipends, PTO, health insurance
- Creative studio environment
All roles in-office (Irvine, California). To apply: include a portfolio of work, ideally including a system you designed and would do differently today.