Staff Backend Engineer

We’re looking for a Staff-level Backend Engineer to help design, build, and operate the core systems behind our product. This role is both highly hands-on and highly influential—you’ll lead projects end-to-end while actively contributing to feature development and platform evolution.

Who we are

• Rodeo is on a mission to help friends be better friends with their friends.
• We’re an experienced team with deep 0-1 social experience (Hinge, Facebook, Duolingo) and we enjoy working together in Soho.
• Since we launched our private beta in November 2025, we’ve brought in tens of thousands of engaged users, earned millions of organic views through our content, earned placements in Forbes, WIRED, Rolodex Media, As Seen On, Business Insider, and are building Rodeo every single day with a community of people as passionate as we are about touching grass + being better friends to our friends.
• You can find Rodeo in the app store (use code SAMIAM)

More: Rodeo the Company

Who you are

Killer IC talent

• You have excellent craft—know your tools inside and out
• Strong backend-as-a-product sense
• Creative first principles thinker
• Strong communicator since you are the interface between frontend and backend
• Been exposed to multiple languages, frameworks, and distributed systems—you have well-developed assessment and comparison muscles

Ready to operate at 0 to 1

• Thrive on vague context, open possibilities
• Light process that drives progress
• Focus on velocity and super low iteration latency
• Ambitious and hungry
  

What You’ll Do

• Lead and deliver projects spanning both product features and core platform work
• Design, build, and ship backend features end-to-end, not just architecture
• Architect and evolve event-driven, distributed systems
• Own system design decisions across multiple services and domains
• Build and maintain Node.js backend services within a microservice architecture
• Drive operational excellence: observability, monitoring, alerting, and reliability
• Use tools like Datadog, Grafana, Prometheus, or similar to understand and improve production systems
• Design, query, and optimize Postgres schemas and data access patterns
• Mentor engineers and raise the bar for backend engineering practices
• Partner closely with product, infra, and leadership to balance speed, quality, and scale
  

What We’re Looking For

• Prior Lead IC experience; 8+ years of backend engineering experience (or equivalent depth)
• Comfortable being both a technical leader and an active contributor
• Proven experience leading complex backend projects from design through production
• Architectural leadership
• Strong experience building event-driven architectures in production
• Deep understanding of microservice architectures and their operational tradeoffs
• Hands-on contributions
• Hands-on experience with asynchronous applications; we use Typescript/Node.js
• Comfortable with relational databases, including performance and schema design; we use Postgresql
• Operations
• “Operational Excellence” is a term in your vocabulary
• Practical experience with observability tooling (Datadog, Grafana, etc.)
• Familiarity with Infrastructure-as-Code (IoC)
  

Nice to Have

• Experience with GraphQL
• Heroku, Google Cloud platform, or AWS
• Experience with Kubernetes
• Kafka
  

Why This Role

• Meaningful ownership over both what gets built and how it’s built
• Direct impact on customer-facing features and foundational systems
• A role that values strong technical judgment, not just delivery
  

Our Stack

We use the simplest architecture possible with no frills. This lets us focus on velocity while our product feature set is rapidly evolving. As we grow, we scale our stack as needed. You don’t need to have deep experience with all of these but you do need to be willing to dig in.

Protocols: GraphQL, REST, Node.js, event-driven architecture

Languages: Typescript, SQL

Data: Postgres, Redis, Firebase

Deployment: GitHub, Heroku, Docker

Monitoring: Sentry, Mixpanel, Betterstack