Senior Back-End Engineer - remote

Float
Posted 1 month ago
We Work Remotely

Float is the world’s leading software for teams to plan their time. Launched in 2012, we’ve grown every year since, and remain proudly independent, self-funded and profitable. As a certified B Corporation, we’re committed to making a positive contribution to our team, customers, the environment, and the remote community. We’re a team of 50 working 100% remotely who believe in living our Best Work Life. You’ll partner with team members globally, including Australia, Mexico, Italy, Nigeria, Canada, and the USA. Hear what our team has to say by browsing our blog, or reading our Glassdoor reviews. Check out what our customers think of Float from our G2 reviews.

We’re on a scale up journey, and we’re seeking people who thrive in this stage, given the autonomy, and the opportunity, to do the best work of their career.

Why We’re Hiring For This Role

At Float we’re in search of a highly skilled and experienced individual who excels at crafting scalable, high-performance, and sustainable services that align with our overall technical vision.

As we embark on an exciting new chapter of growth, it has created an exciting opportunity for you to join us on the mission to expand, scale, and maintain our back-end services.

Our global Engineering team is a dynamic mix of brilliant minds and motivated individuals, spanning the world. You'll become an integral member of our services team, a close-knit group of engineers dedicated to fortifying and improving the backbone of our product while maintaining our unwavering commitment to quality.

Our back-end services are evolving to support Float's remarkable growth trajectory, and you'll play a pivotal role in shaping, evaluating and building out the next phase of our architecture. You’ll have the opportunity to make a profound impact at the very heart of what will drive Float's future success!

Christian, our Services Team Lead, explains the important role you will play within our engineering team. Watch this video!


You’ll be working asynchronously with a bright, dedicated team from across the globe, with a strong focus on taking complex problems and creating solutions that feel simple and intuitive for our customers.

What You’ll Be Responsible For

As a part of the services team, you’ll be maintaining and developing features that helps power over 4,500 of the world’s top teams and a growing 100,000+ user base.

You’ll be working to ensure the robustness and reliability of these services, implementing new features to take them to the next level as well as being involved in the discussions and practicalities of scaling our back-end systems to support an ever-growing customer base as well as ever growing individual customers themselves.

You'll be joining a small team of engineers taking ownership of both the core components as well as building innovative features that provide the stickiness that allow customers to use Float to the fullest extent.

You’ll be working with a progressive product team to design and implement services that will support the development of new features across our web, mobile and desktop app products.


In the immediate future, you’ll:
  • Become familiar with the engineering team’s workflow and internal processes
  • Gain a deep understanding of our product and the technical philosophy that drives it, while also aligning with our vision for future growth
  • Immerse yourself in our systems and services through curiosity, and dig deep to gain a solid understanding of our architecture and codebase
  • Collaborate with your peers to deliver impactful changes to our product and platform
  • Participate in code reviews, and technical design discussions to sharpen your understanding, while also being empowered to challenge the status quo with objectivity

Once you are a bit more settled, we expect that you will start contributing to the following initiatives:
  • Scale Float’s product offering by working closely with cross-functional teams to deliver high-quality features that bring value to our clients
  • Leading the internal integration strategy in order to adapt our architecture to the shift towards a more event-driven data and process flow
  • Expand our services suite to support cross-functional teams, align with business growth, and bring with it the necessary adjustments in operational workflows in order to promote focus on testability, reliability, and scalability
  • Apply a proactive, forward-thinking mental model to keep innovating the way we view our architecture and ancillary systems, and in collaboration with the services team, put those ideas into practice

Your contributions will emphasize customer-centricity, serving as a bridge between platform innovation and ensuring customer impact and success remain at the forefront of decision-making.


What You’ll Need To Be Successful


We're seeking individuals with a proven track record of effectively developing, maintaining, and deploying reliable, resilient, and high-performance production services capable of scaling in alignment with Float's ambitious growth objectives. We want you to love your work and believe that these skills will allow you to succeed in the role.

Applying these skills requires:
  • A strong understanding of engineering principles that drive the delivery of high quality services during the growth phase of a business
  • A high level of proficiency in PHP and Node.js in a production environment
  • A strong command of SQL and NoSQL database technologies with a focus on MySQL and MongoDB
  • Experience in designing and developing services within a microservices architecture
  • Experience with serverless architecture (Cloud Run and App Engine in particular), including discernment of usage scenarios
  • Experience in event-driven and asynchronous architectures to support scalable and reliable distributed systems
  • Experience developing integrations with third-party API’s

It would be a bonus if you have:
  • Experience with the implementation of event streaming systems and Change Data Capture (CDC) reliably
  • Experience with integrating graph databases with services, such as Neo4j
  • Experience in designing and expanding generative AI components, with a focus and scalability and efficiency
  • Experience in working with other database technologies or search and analytics engines such as ElasticSearch or similar
  • Experience in working with columnar based database technologies such as Apache Cassandra or similar
  • Experience with system programming languages, such as Rust and Go
  • Experience with any other general purpose high-level programming language suited to scripting, data aggregation and scientific computing, such as Python

As a fully remote team, we’re looking for someone comfortable with asynchronous communication as the default, which means you have previous remote experience and are comfortable using tools like Slack, Loom, and Linear to communicate as needed. Don’t worry—you will have significant deep work time since we have very few meetings.


Why Join Us


Pay for this role is US $161,475 (Level 3). Here’s a blog post with more information on how we determine our salaries.

We’re a global async remote company with a diverse team of people from all over the world who share a common belief in living our best work life. We believe deeply in the idea of transparency and share our Float Handbook publicly so potential new team members can see first hand our perks &benefits as well as our ways of working. If you feel like you can thrive at Float to do your best work, we would love to hear from you.


Hiring Process For This Role

You’ll find a lot of useful information about our interview process and what it’s like to join our global team on the Float careers page. The hiring process for this role looks like this:

  • Initial First Meet (20 min): You'll meet with Julia Fulton, Talent Manager, to discuss your interest in the role and review your questions about working at Float.
  • Take-Home Assignment: Candidates that move forward will be invited to complete a technical assignment for the engineering team to review. This is a 4-hour assignment. Candidates will receive high-level feedback from the hiring team and those that move forward will proceed to the technical interview stage to discuss results further in more detail.
  • Technical Interview (60 min): You’ll meet with Christian (Services Team Lead) and another member of the engineering team to discuss your technical experience and skills, as well as deep dive into your take-home assignment.
  • Manager Interview (30 min): You’ll meet with Colin (Director of Engineering) and Lars (CTO), to dive deeper into your skills and experience.
  • Founder Interview (30 min): You’ll meet with Glenn, Float’s CEO, to get to know you and see if you have potential to be a great addition to the team.



Note: Industry research shows that women and those in traditionally underrepresented groups generally don’t apply to jobs unless they check all the boxes for the role. If you feel strongly that you have what it takes for this role but don’t check 100% of the boxes—that’s okay—we encourage you to apply anyway and highlight what you can bring to the table.