Backend Engineer (Go + Postgres)

Who we are

We're a small, profitable company that's growing fast. We aren't burning VC money on a pitch deck. We have real users, real revenue, and real problems to solve. This isn't a cushy job. Pay is fair, benefits are modest, and sometimes something breaks on a Saturday morning and we fix it. If that sounds like a dealbreaker, it probably is, and that's fine.

The role

You'll be a backend engineer working mostly in Go, with a lot of agent-assisted development. You'll also take on the work that keeps a dev shop running: schema design, data modeling, debugging production issues, and figuring out what we need to build next and how it should be structured.

This role is meant to grow. We're looking for someone who can steadily take on more responsibility for the technical direction of the product. That includes architecture, data design, and steering where the software goes. If you want to own things, there's room to own a lot.

What actually matters

You know relational databases. You don't need to be a DBA, but you need to be fluent. You understand normalization, joins, indexes, and constraints. You can look at a slow query and figure out why it's slow. You know which tables an endpoint touches without guessing. If something goes wrong, your instinct is to open a SQL client and look, not to add more logging and hope.

We believe you can't be a good backend engineer without this. Your models, your API, and your data have to line up cleanly, and if the schema is wrong, everything built on top of it is wrong. Expect database questions in the interview. They won't be trick questions. They will be the first thing we filter on.

You've built real backend systems. Ideally that includes something in a typed, compiled language, and Go is a plus but not required. You've shipped things that real people used, and you've dealt with what happens after launch.

You have design judgment. AI agents can write code fast, so writing code is no longer the hard part. The hard part is knowing when the agent's output is the wrong abstraction, the wrong data model, or a problem waiting to happen in six months. We use agentic tools heavily, and we need someone who steers them, not someone who just accepts whatever they produce.

Some front-end ability is a plus. You can find your way around React and TypeScript well enough to not be blocked.

Our stack

Backend: Go (Fiber)
Database: PostgreSQL
Mobile: React Native
Web: Next.js
Infra: AWS
Development: heavily agent-assisted

Who you are

You learn things because you want to, not because a syllabus told you to. Your degree, if you have one, is the least interesting thing about you. We care much more about the weird project you built because you wanted to see if it could be done, the tool you made because nothing else did what you needed, or the rabbit hole you went down and came out of knowing something new.

You're comfortable with direct communication. We're blunt here. Feedback is specific, disagreements are out in the open, and nobody pretends a bad idea is a good one to be polite. Some people find that exhausting. Others find it a relief. We're hiring the second group.

This probably isn't for you if

Your whole backend experience is Node/Express with MongoDB, and you've never designed a relational schema from scratch
You want to hand tickets to an AI and ship whatever it gives back
You're looking for a large-company role with a clear ladder, a big benefits package, and fixed hours

How to apply

Skip the cover letter. Answer this one question instead, in your own words, in under 150 words:

Tell us about something you built for yourself that nobody asked you to build. What was it, and what broke along the way?

We read every answer. We can tell when it's AI-generated, and those applications are rejected without further review. A short, specific, honest answer will get much further than a polished essay.