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As a Senior Staff Software Engineer, backend at mmhmm, you’ll work as part of a small cross-functional team of front, back, and full-stack engineers to create the next generation of features for our product. While your day-to-day responsibilities will focus on the development of backend APIs, systems, and infrastructure, your contributions won’t stop there. You’ll also play a vital role in product definition and the overarching system architecture, providing invaluable insights and helping steer the course of our innovation journey.
The mmhmm backend runs on a wide range of AWS services such as Lambda, RDS, S3, and ECS among others. It’s written primarily in Go. Our core philosophy is to build only what’s needed to bring our product vision to life, building on top of the well-established work of others whenever we can.
You’re the ideal candidate for this position if you excel in self-management, thrive in small team settings, prioritize producing high-quality code and products, enjoy the dynamic nature of startup environments with their inherent ambiguities, and are comfortable tackling challenges across the server-side stack
You will be responsible for:
- Design and development of backend APIs and services.
- Building both quick prototypes and robust production systems.
- Planning and coordinating within the team and across the engineering organization.
- Helping to set the technical direction for the service backend, including choosing new components of the tech stack, evolving the service architecture and defining client-facing APIs.
The ideal candidate will have:
- Spent at least 10 years in professional software engineering roles.
- Strong backend engineering skills, including API and database design.
- Built complex, cloud-native product backends from scratch.
- Deep experience with AWS.
- Experience programming in Go, or an eagerness and aptitude for learning new languages.
- Experience with both relational and NoSQL (e.g. DynamoDB) databases and a point-of-view on how to choose between them.
- Exceptional communication skills, with an aptitude to convey clear thoughts and ideas.
- A track record of delivering on ambitious goals and a well-calibrated sense of how to balance perfect vs. done. You know how to ship.
- Worked in a startup environment. You’re comfortable with ambiguity and change.
- Experience with streaming video. This is a plus, but not required.
Our Principles
As a company, we realize that talent is evenly distributed throughout the world, but opportunity is not. We believe that you should work where you can have the best impact, and live where you can have the best life.
Compensation
The salary range for this position is $209,000-$227,000 for a full-time Senior Staff Engineer based in the United States, but it may vary depending on your specific skills and experience. We’ve invested the time and effort to develop salary levels for all of our roles, for both individual contributors and managers. These levels are based on national compensation data, and are weighted to be competitive in the most expensive markets in the US. Final leveling and cash compensation will be determined at the end of the interview process.
Benefits
In addition to base salary, our team receives equity and a variety of other benefits. We offer all US employees and their dependents comprehensive medical, dental, and vision insurance, covering 90% of the premium for employees, and 70% of the premium for qualifying dependents. US-based employees may also participate in our 401k, and we also offer life insurance.
Everyone on the team is eligible for a bonus for meeting colleagues in person (an opportunity to build precious relationship capital with teammates), and our monthly distributed facilities supplement. The latter is money we add to everyone’s payroll for you to set up a productive and distraction-free work environment, no strings attached, and no receipts required.
How We Work
We’ve recently decided to work seasonally–focused periods of work with limited breaks, followed by 2 consecutive weeks off all together, all at the same time. This means we work hard from early January to mid July, take a break, and focus on output from mid July through late December, and then take another break. It means other things too, but we’ll explain it when we get into the interview process.
This Senior Staff Software Engineer, Backend role is a full-time position reporting to the Engineering Manager on the Backend team. This role can be based in any location globally that has significant overlap with US time zones. Since our distributed team works across US time zones, US-based applicants are preferred.
mmhmm is committed to creating and fostering a diverse team. We encourage people from underrepresented backgrounds and all walks of life to apply. We’re committed to providing reasonable accommodations to all applicants throughout the application process.
