Staff Backend Engineer

Job description

**🌎 About Us** At TeamSnap, we believe when the world connects through sports; the world becomes better. TeamSnap is a sports and communication platform dedicated to taking the work out of play in youth sports. We also believe our jobs should excite us, our teammates should support us and our bosses should inspire us. We empower our people to bring big ideas and tiny egos, landing us on Outside Magazine’s list of “**Best Places to Work"** and Built In’s “**100 Best Remote-First Places to Work."** TeamSnap is seeking a Staff Software Engineer, Backend, to join our fully distributed engineering team and help us continue scaling systems that serve millions of daily users and tens of thousands of amateur sports organizations. Our primary backend stack includes Node and TypeScript, alongside Elixir, SQL, cloud-based services, event-driven systems, queues, background jobs, caching layers, and observability tooling. We are looking for a hands-on Staff Backend Engineer with deep, meaningful production Node experience who can build and improve APIs and services, reason through production issues across the system, lead technical design in ambiguous areas, mentor engineers, and raise the quality bar across the team. This person should bring strong systems thinking that connects application architecture with infrastructure, platform, data, security, and other adjacent domains, bringing those teams into architecture and solutioning conversations early without being expected to own those functions directly. As an engineering team, we architect and build scalable systems using service-oriented and event-driven architecture. This role will help shape the technical foundation behind TeamSnap’s product experience, with a focus on backend systems, APIs, services, data performance, reliability, observability, and production quality. ### What You'll Do: - Architect, build, and evolve backend APIs, services, event-driven workflows, queues, background jobs, data models, caching strategies, and integrations that support millions of users and thousands of sports organizations. - Own complex backend product and technical work from discovery through design, implementation, rollout, production support, and long term maintainability. - Lead ambiguous technical initiatives by breaking down problems, identifying risks, making practical tradeoffs, and helping teams move from uncertainty to clear execution. - Provide technical leadership across our Node ecosystem by advancing shared patterns, standards, tooling, and practices, and helping engineers make better Node-specific architectural and operational decisions. - Connect application architecture with platform, infrastructure, data, security, observability, and other adjacent domains, identifying concerns early and bringing the right teams into architecture, solutioning, and scaling decisions. - Improve the reliability, scalability, performance, and operability of production systems through thoughtful architecture, strong testing practices, database optimization, caching, monitoring, alerting, and incident follow-up. - Debug complex production issues by reasoning across application code, databases, caches, queues, jobs, observability data, and the broader request lifecycle. - Partner with Product, Design, Engineering, Infrastructure, Platform, Data, Support, and other teams to turn roadmap needs into durable backend systems and practical delivery plans. - Strong interpersonal skills with the ability to give and receive constructive feedback, mentor engineers, influence cross-team alignment and articulate technical trade-offs to non-technical stakeholders ### What Will Set You Up for Success: - Staff level backend engineering depth, with deep, meaningful production Node experience at scale and a strong track record of architecting, building, operating, and improving complex backend systems. - Deep Node and TypeScript experience, including strong understanding of runtime behavior, concurrency, failure modes, performance characteristics, production debugging, and the architectural tradeoffs involved in operating Node systems at scale. - Strong systems thinking, with the ability to connect application architecture and runtime decisions with platform, infrastructure, data, security, observability, and other adjacent domains, bringing those perspectives and teams into the process early as systems are architected, built, and scaled. - Strong SQL and relational database judgment, including indexing, query optimization, migrations, profiling, data modeling, transactions, read and write patterns, and performance tuning. - Practical understanding of service-oriented architecture, event-driven architecture, queues, background jobs, webhooks, Redis or similar caching tools, and systems that need to scale under real production load. - Working knowledge of production infrastructure and platform concerns, enough to reason through deployments, containers, CI/CD pipelines, cloud services, networking basics, observability, and operational debugging. - Strong production ownership mindset, with the ability to use logs, metrics, traces, dashboards, alerts, incident reviews, and system behavior to improve reliability over time. - Demonstrated ability to lead through influence, mentor engineers, facilitate technical decisions, communicate tradeoffs clearly, and connect backend technical choices to customer impact, business needs, and long term maintainability. ### Bonus: - Previous work in or close partnership with infrastructure, platform, SRE, DevOps, or data teams. - Elasticsearch experience, particularly operating, scaling, troubleshooting, or designing search and indexing workloads in production. - Familiarity with BigQuery, analytics pipelines, reporting workflows, or high-volume data processing. - Responsible use of AI-assisted engineering workflows to improve debugging, testing, documentation, refactoring, prototyping, or developer experience without compromising quality or understanding.