Senior engineer (backend)

koodos
koodos

Software Engineering

Posted 6+ months ago

Why join koodos labs?

koodos labs is a consumer AI research and product company dedicated to ensuring that the internet knows you and can do things for you, on your terms. We are the company behind Shelf, the leading personal context platform used by millions of people to track and understand what they consume. Read about the co-founders and their story here. They’ve raised 3 (unannounced) rounds from the world’s leading investors, and their Board is comprised of Pinterest’s co-founder, Facebook’s first head of monetization and a leading GP.

You should join koodos labs for the people and our mission.

We aspire to build the best team of the 2020s. Just like PayPal in the 90s, Google in the 00s, and Stripe in the 10s, we want to be known as "a place where it's good to be from." If you join us, we promise to be the best place to grow your career — with the best people you've ever worked with. We’re also working on a very bold mission.

Read more about working at koodos labs here.

What we’re building

Shelf is used millions of people to track what they’re watching, reading, listening to & more, and to keep up with what others are into. Shelf connects to your favorite platforms, shares back insights from your behavior, and will soon let you share that context with services to enable personalized intelligence, on your terms.

The Opportunity

We believe that the way consumers and businesses interact with their data will drastically improve in the next few years. Koodos Labs is building the products and infrastructure that’ll usher this shift and you'll be essential in achieving this vision.

We’re looking for an experienced, thoughtful senior software engineer to accelerate our product development and ability to scalably generate insights.

In this role you will:

  • Architect at Scale: Build decoupled, resilient data ingestion and processing pipelines that handle millions of events daily.
  • Direct Impact: Work side-by-side with our CTO and founding engineers to shape product strategy and technical direction.
  • Robust Product Features: Develop scalable APIs and services that enable real-time insights and seamless user experiences.
  • Technical Excellence: Champion automation, testing, and infrastructure-as-code best practices to ensure continuous, reliable deployments.
  • Leadership Through Ownership: Mentor peers while taking full ownership of a rapidly evolving codebase in a high-growth startup environment (note: this is an IC role; if you're looking for a pure Engineering Manager role, this isn't the best fit)
  • Architect & Build: Design event-driven APIs, data pipelines, and microservices that decouple ingestion from downstream processing.
  • We’re early stage, so you'll have an outsized equity stake and an unparalleled opportunity to shape the product direction. Engineers at koodos labs decide what gets built and why, in addition to figuring out how.

    We're NY-based (we have our own office in West Soho) and we work in-person.

    Ideal Candidate

    We recognize that a confidence gap might discourage amazing candidates from applying. Every job description is a wish list, so please reach out if this role really excites you.

    You’re likely a good fit if you are:

  • Architectural Specialist: Design and implement scalable event-driven and microservice architectures with proven expertise in creating decoupled, fault-tolerant systems handling millions of events daily. Experience with event streaming technologies (Kafka, Kinesis, Google Cloud PubSub, Flink) required.
  • You're obsessed with ontologies and data models. You know most systems are rotten at the core because engineers treat modeling as boring.
  • Fast growth rate: proven learner, adaptable and can pick up new technologies fast
  • You have an extremely high bar for talent and still aim to be the best engineer on your team.
  • You think "speed vs. quality" is a cope for teams that are bad at both.
  • Proven Backend Expert: You have experience build scalable systems that are able to process data to power features and user experiences. You know how to design data models, work with large datasets, implement APIs, and leverage cloud infrastructure to achieve your goals. You have experience with NodeJS, Postgres, and AWS.
  • Pragmatic: You know when to take on technical debt, descope features, work on architecture, and prioritize enablers. You are able to use your understanding of the business and product to maximize you and the team’s impact and productivity.
  • CI/CD & Automation Enthusiast: Familiar with setting up automated testing, continuous integration/deployment pipelines, and Infrastructure-as-Code (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform/Pulumi).
  • Collaborative Communicator: You excel at cross-team collaboration, code reviews, and mentoring, ensuring best practices and high-quality code across the board.
  • Product-Focused Engineer: You understand how technical decisions drive user experience and are committed to delivering tangible, impactful product improvements.
  • Startup Experience: You know that building great companies takes a lot of work. Early-stage companies can offer some of the most challenging, invigorating, and rewarding experiences in tech — quite simply, koodos labs is different from Big Tech. It helps if you’ve experienced the ups and downs of startup life before, but so long as you’re excited for an adventure, we’re excited to have you join.
  • You make fun of 9-to-5 engineers that rest-and-vest
  • What you'll do

    Day 1: You’ll merge your first PR. We want our developer experience to be as smooth as possible, so this first day is a good test of how we’re doing there.

    Day 7: You’ll ship your first feature to production. We believe in learning-by-doing, so we’ll assign you a small feature that lets you run through our full feature planning and development pipeline. We’ll make sure you have support at every step along the way.

    Day 50: You’ll help ship code across the backend, from services to CI/CD. As an early-stage startup, we have high-impact features all across our codebase, and you’ll be able to build solutions wherever the need arises.

    In the Future: You’ll become a senior leader at koodos labs. We expect the early team to grow into high-impact roles as the company scales.

    How we interview

    We aim to move fast — typically two weeks end-to-end. We find this works best for both us and you!

    And we focus on real-world experience, demonstrated ability, and references. No riddles or binary tree puzzles — just a thoughtful look at what you’ve done and where you’re headed.

    Introduction: We’ll kick things off by sharing a short video about the team and role. It’s a great way to get context and prep questions ahead of our call.

    Technical Screening: A conversation with our CTO to dig into your background, goals, and share more about what we’re building at koodos.

    Take-Home Exercise: A short video from you walking through your experience with tools and challenges relevant to our work, or perhaps links to your open source contributions.

    Cultural Screening: If things are feeling like a fit, we’ll do a second interview — a session with our CEO, this time focused on what we look for in team members (see here for more).

    Onsite: You’ll meet the team. We spread this across two days to reduce load:

    Day 1: System design deep dive

    Day 2: Lunch with the team, behavioral interview, and a DevOps discussion

    References: We’ll ask for 2–3 references, and may also reach out to others you’ve worked with (let us know if there are any sensitivities). We’ll keep it brief and respectful — usually ~15 mins per call. You’re also welcome to reference check us.

    Decision: We’ll move quickly on our end.

    How to apply

    If interested, please drop us a line on team@koodos.com with your resume and your thoughts on how personalization could work for Shelf.

    FAQs

    Where will I work?

    What tech stack do you currently use?

    Are you hiring interns?

    Are you open to part-time?

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