Senior Backend Engineer
Authory
As a Senior Backend Engineer you will be the link between our backend infrastructure and our frontend, enabling a fast and reliable user experience at Authory, a rapidly growing platform that thousands of writers, journalists and thought leaders around the world are using every single day.Authory currently maintains terabytes of data, most of which is accessible instantaneously. We carefully engineer how we design our data storage and data access patterns - to enable fast responses, but also to keep our data consistent while ingesting thousands of data points per minute. We are a small team with a focus on quality and excellence in turning the tremendous amount of data that is behind Authory into an accessible, beautiful and meaningful product. You will be responsible for small and large projects, and take them from planning to completion. You will be our first full-time hire for this position, with the option of leading our future backend engineering team. 1. The way we workWe are a remote first company. We value your integrity, autonomy and willingness to learn and share as a team above everything else
You can work from anywhere you like. We have a small headquarter office near Berlin but our team is completely remote and works from Portugal, Austria, and Germany. Your working hours are flexible.
Authory is a small company — you will have a lot of freedom and a lot of ownership. We are careful to limit meetings to give our engineers time to focus and build an A+ product.
2. The technologies and concepts you will work with
- You will work on a fast and reliable REST API built using Node.js and PostgreSQL. The application is written in Typescript.
- You will design SQL queries which crunch through tables with hundreds of millions of rows, but still provide results within milliseconds. Working with relational databases, especially query optimization, migrating and scaling area is a big part of the job.
- Our backend is hosted on AWS. The API is provisioned as a Docker container on an ECS cluster. We manage our infrastructure with terraform to enable maximum reproducibility between staging and production environments.
- A number of features are highly complex, and many endpoints aggregate lots of data. Consistency, accuracy and performance are among our highest priorities.
- We pride ourselves in rigorous testing and quality assurance. Creating reliable work is more important to us than using fancy frameworks. The backend is covered by a large test suite, with third party dependencies mocked.
- The entire backend is built to provide maximum performance while being scalable, enabling a lightning-fast experience for our users.
3. The work to be doneYour work on the core of Authory is incredibly important to enable a smooth customer experience and future product growth. What you will do affects thousands of journalists, writers and bloggers who use Authory every single day.
- You will have the opportunity to establish a holistic and robust architecture for our API layer and gradually transition to this new architecture.
- You will implement and test new and powerful features to enable new use cases and features in an elegant, yet efficient manner. You will work together with the whole team to design holistic solutions for technical problems.
- You will design highly optimized SQL queries, and structure our data accordingly.
- You will find solutions to scale our backend to thousands of users by designing and implementing efficient database queries.
- Optionally, you are welcome to check out some work on our AI-driven and highly parallel import pipeline if you are looking to expand your skillset in that area.
4. About youFirst and foremost, you are self-motivated and self-directed. You will have the opportunity to take real ownership of your work and see it through from start to finish, understanding that you are responsible for tackling and clearing any obstacles in the way, with the help of the entire team of course. At Authory, true ownership means that you own the losses just as much as the wins, and both will naturally occur.
Beyond these fundamental qualities, you are:
- Focussed on code quality and have the discipline to test your changes thoroughly.
- Open to giving and receiving honest feedback.
- Consider mistakes as an opportunity to learn.
- Ready to discuss possible solutions and different approaches to a problem.
- You have strong skill and experience developing and testing software.
- You have 3+ years of experience of developing Node.js-based APIs, preferably using TypeScript. A strong proficiency in designing and writing tests is a requirement.
- You have 3+ years of experience working with SQL, including advanced concepts as indexes and query optimization.
- Any experience with Terraform and AWS (ECS, VPC, S3, RDS, CodeBuild) is an advantage.
5. Benefits
- Remote work (you can work from anywhere since we are fully remote)
- Flexible work hours
- 25 days vacation per year
- Generous compensation, Stock Option Package available
- Option to become leader of future backend engineering team
- Time to code. As we are a small team, we have less meetings and focus on building an A+ product.
- Space to grow. You will be able to explore new technologies and learn from other engineers in the company along the way.
- Truly meaningful work. You are honing a product that a truly important part of our society (writers and journalists) relies on every single day.
Even though this is a remote position, your regular working day must have an overlap of 4 hours or more with CET (UTC+1) from Monday to Friday.
6. About AuthoryAuthory is a rapidly growing platform enabling writers, journalists, bloggers and all kinds of thought leaders to take control of their content, build their own audience and advance their career — regardless of where they publish.Founded in 2017, we are dedicated to helping writers (and in the future all kinds of content creators) to become more independent and succeed in the challenging environment of online media.Our platform is used by 1,000s of customers every day, among them journalists for The New York Times, Washington Post, The Economist, TechCrunch, CNN and many, many more.Learn more about Authory at authory.com
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