Principal Backend Engineer Full Time

What’s the opportunity?

The Principal Backend Engineer will shape how we build our product by adding SaaS backend product development expertise to our team and balancing product technical maturity work alongside iterative feature releases. You’ll be responsible for mentoring and guiding technical decisions of the team to set us up for long-term success, both as a product and as a team. You will work on our engineering team alongside design and product management. This is a high-impact role where you will be involved in technical & product strategy, operations, architecture, and execution.

Our modern stack: Typescript end-to-end. Hasura backend powers a GraphQL middle layer that serves data to our React frontend. Xstate decouples our logic and presentation layers.

What will you do?

Deliver code, tests, and tooling to help our team build habitable, scalable production software
Build alignment with documents and diagrams appropriate to the product development lifecycle stage
Define, scale, and improve infrastructure, APIs, and services
Help our team scale our product by moving to serverless or another solution
Use system-level thinking to guide proposed solutions
Mentor other engineers with a supportive leadership approach and close team communication
Design and build solutions for frequent, iterative releases
Leverage feedback, mentorship, and self-awareness to continuously improve

What experience do you need?

Must-have:

Backend development experience on customer-facing enterprise SaaS software products
DevOps experience: running services in production, writing meaningful tests, and appreciating the value of logging, monitoring, and error tracking
System-level technical decision-making with clear communication of outcome and rationale
Exceptional JavaScript / Node.js skills
Engineering mentorship for high-impact projects
Delivery of high-quality, iterative work in Agile, fast-paced environments

Nice-to-have:

PostgreSQL, GraphQL, Typescript, and React
Setup and maintenance of modern services technologies such as Kubernetes, Docker, webhooks, serverless, and Hasura
Experience working with teams distributed across different time zones
Experience working with design systems, setting up a design system and/or using a design system to build other products

About Knapsack:

Knapsack is an enterprise-grade design system platform connecting design and code for teams of every size. We enable organizations to build products in a pattern-based way, which helps to break down silos and advance all of their products at the same time. As a team, we strive to approach every opportunity, every challenge, every conversation with our core values top of mind:

Honor openness and vulnerability. We believe that diverse voices are important and lead to better solutions. We foster an environment where opinions and feedback are not only heard, but carry weight. We are kind and empathetic in our communications with each other and regularly express gratitude for each other’s contributions. Feedback is delivered compassionately and intended to inspire growth.

Practice mindfulness and intentionality. Our actions are centered around our intentions and aligned toward shared outcomes. We communicate with intentionality—we focus on the future, not just the present. We respect the humility of not knowing and appreciate questions as much as answers. We use our voices, drive, and experiences to find ways to improve the business while growing as a team and individuals.

Prioritize shipping, not perfection. To get our customers the tools they need as quickly as possible, we want to ship good—not perfect. To achieve this, we keep communications and planning as simple and straightforward as possible. We strive to be iterative in our workflows; with strong beliefs loosely held we can react to customer feedback and build great products for our users.

Act with user empathy. User needs and struggles are at the heart of our work. Empathy for, and direct feedback from our users guides us and keeps us aligned towards shared goals.
If you share this vision, we’d love to work with you at Knapsack. Knapsack is an equal opportunity workplace. We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity, or Veteran status. If you have a special need that requires accommodation, please let us know.