Golang Backend Engineer

Read this part first

This is an equity-only role right now. There is no salary attached to it today. We're a Delaware C-corp with a live product on iOS and Android, currently raising a $1.5M seed round. When that round closes, this role converts to salary + equity, and the equity you've already earned stays yours.

If that isn't the trade you're looking for, no hard feelings — stop here rather than spend your time applying. If you've been looking for real ownership in something already shipping, keep reading.

What Dayout is

The calendar was built for work. We're building the one for life.

Dayout is a marketplace where practitioners — trainers, yoga and wellness instructors, dietitians, coaches, city-guide curators — sell their programs and sessions as rich, content-first plans. Buyers don't get a PDF. They get video, location pins and reminders that drop straight onto their in-app calendar, so they actually go do the thing.

Where we are: live on iOS and Android since June 2025, 270+ practitioners signed up, and a concentrated launch underway in Austin, our home market. We're graduates of the Geekdom accelerator and members of Google's startup program.

What you'd be working on

We've moved our backend from Laravel to Go, and that migration is close to done. You're joining for what comes after it — which means you get a clean Go codebase and new work, not a year of porting someone else's PHP.

Closing out the last of the migration and retiring what's left of the legacy backend
Building new product features on the Go backend — this is the bulk of the role
Payments and payouts plumbing (Stripe Connect, PayPal)
Hardening what we've shipped: performance, error handling, observability, the things you skip during a migration and pay for later
Deployment and infra work on GCP / Railway
Writing tests that let a small team ship without a QA bottleneck

You'll own defined slices end to end, not tickets someone else has already designed. If you need constant direction to make progress, this will be frustrating for both of us.

The team you'd join

Small and paired: three front-end engineers, two other backend engineers, and two QA engineers. Fully remote, spread across time zones. Our founder is a product designer by trade and writes the specs himself, so you'll get clear direction on what and real latitude on how.

How we work

Jira is the source of truth. Every piece of work is a ticket with a defined scope and an owner. You move your own tickets through the board as you go — In Progress when you start, not the day before standup. If a ticket is blocked or the scope turns out to be wrong, that goes in the ticket, in writing, the day you find out.

Slack is where the team lives. We're async by necessity, so decisions and blockers get written down in channels rather than settled in a call nobody else heard. You don't need to be online at fixed hours, but you do need to be reachable within a reasonable window and to answer threads you're tagged in.

Postman is how we verify APIs. Every endpoint you build ships with a working Postman request our QA engineers can run — request, expected response, error cases. An endpoint that isn't documented in Postman isn't done. This is the handoff point between backend and QA, and it's non-negotiable.

Figma holds the designs, and the front-end team builds against them. When your API shape affects what a screen can do, say so early.

Communication is the job

We're fully remote, and that makes communication the single most important skill in this role — above raw technical ability. The people who work out here aren't the ones who write the cleverest code. They're the ones who say "I'm stuck on this, here's what I've tried" on day two instead of day nine.

What that looks like in practice:

Surface problems early. A blocker you flag on Monday is a conversation. The same blocker discovered on Friday is a missed sprint.
Write things down. If it happened in a DM or a call, it didn't happen. Decisions go in the ticket or the channel.
Give real status. "Almost done" tells us nothing. "Endpoint works, still fixing the pagination edge case, one more day" tells us everything.
Ask before you assume. Building the wrong thing correctly costs more than a five-minute question.

If going quiet when something gets hard is a pattern for you, this role won't work. We'd rather hear from you too often than not enough.

What we're looking for

Required

2–4+ years writing backend code, with Go in production — not just tutorials or a side project
Solid REST API design instincts: versioning, error handling, pagination, auth
Comfortable with relational databases (Postgres/MySQL) and writing your own migrations
Git, Docker, and a habit of testing your own work
Comfortable documenting your endpoints in Postman as part of shipping them
Strong written communication. You work independently across time zones, you flag blockers early, and you keep your Jira tickets and Slack threads current without being chased

Nice to have

Experience taking a young Go codebase from "it works" to production-hardened
Stripe Connect or marketplace payments experience
GCP, Railway, or similar
Having worked at an early-stage startup and knowing what that actually costs you

What matters most: we've learned that consistency isn't the same as capability. We need someone who can take a genuinely hard, ambiguous problem and land it. That's the bar.

The offer
Equity: 1.0%, 4-year vest with a 1-year cliff
Cash: none today — converts to salary + equity when our seed round closes
Hours: 15–20 per week, flexible, compatible with a day job
Location: fully remote, async
Reports to: Founder/CEO, working alongside our CTO

Apply here on Wellfound — please make sure your profile links to Go code we can actually read. We read the code, and we read your answers as a writing sample.