Software Development Engineer II - Conversations

Responsibilities:

• Build and ship features in Node.js / Go services that sit on real production paths — your code handles live traffic, not toy problems
• Own well-scoped services and components end to end: code, tests, rollout, and monitoring
• Work with SQL and NoSQL data stores — writing queries, adding indexes, and learning why the schema looks the way it does
• Get hands-on with queues, caches, and rate limiters — the building blocks of every system here
• Ship Vue 3 UIs that consume your own APIs — clean components, sane state management, and realtime updates that don't flicker or drift
• Write design docs for your features and defend them in review — clear thinking, honest trade-offs
• Join the on-call rotation with backup from senior engineers — incidents are where the deepest learning happens
• Ask questions relentlessly, absorb feedback from code reviews, and level up fast

Requirements:

• 2+ years of backend engineering experience with strong fundamentals in Node.js, Go, or a comparable language — and the drive to go deep in ours
• Working knowledge of queues or async processing — you've used Pub/Sub, Kafka, RabbitMQ, or similar, and want to master delivery semantics, ordering, and backpressure
• Genuine interest in distributed systems — you understand the basics (idempotency, retries, consistency trade-offs) and are hungry to learn the rest by building
• Hands-on with Redis or another cache/in-memory store, even at small scale
• Comfortable with SQL or NoSQL databases — you can model data, write efficient queries, and reason about indexes
• Proficient in Vue 3 or a similar modern frontend framework — solid component design and real experience with state management (Pinia, Vuex, or equivalent)
• You write tests as a habit and can put your design thinking into a clear doc
• AI-native builder — you code with agents daily and are pushing to get accurate, production-quality output from them

Technical Environment:

• Languages: Node.js (TypeScript), Go
• Frontend: Vue 3, TypeScript, Pinia, Vite, Tailwind
• Storage: MongoDB, Firestore, Redis, ElasticSearch, ClickHouse
• Infra: GCP — GKE, Pub/Sub, Cloud Tasks
• CI/CD: GitHub Actions, Docker, Kubernetes

Why This Role

Most engineers spend years at companies where “scale” means a few hundred requests per second — and never find out what they're capable of.

Here, the systems are the teacher. Every design decision has a visible consequence at billions of events a month. Every incident is a masterclass. You'll sit in architecture reviews with staff engineers debating storage engines and consistency models — and within a year, you'll be contributing to those debates, not just watching them.

If you optimize your career for learning velocity, there is no faster track than this.

On AI

We're past the debate. AI is part of how we build - and we expect you to be hungry for it.

You already code with agents daily. You're learning what they're good at, where they hallucinate, and how to get accurate, tested, slop-free code out of them fast. You treat AI as a multiplier on your learning speed, not a substitute for understanding.

If you're still copy-pasting from a chat window and hoping, this isn't the seat for you.

What you're built for

• You're deeply curious — you don't stop at “it works,” you need to know why it works
• You read post-mortems and system-design write-ups for fun, not because someone assigned them
• You've built things beyond your job description — side projects, internal tools, that one system you rewrote because the old one bothered you
• You take feedback like a gift: code review comments make your next PR better, every time
• When something breaks, your first instinct is curiosity, not panic

What Success looks like

• You own a service or component that the team trusts you on completely
• You're a dependable on-call engineer — you've debugged real incidents and shipped the fixes
• Your design docs have gone from “reviewed heavily” to “approved with nits”
• Senior engineers pull you into harder problems — because you've earned it
• You're visibly on the path to SDE-3, and everyone around you knows it

Bonus Points

• Familiarity with our stack: GCP, MongoDB, Firestore, ClickHouse, ElasticSearch
• You've contributed to a messaging, automation, or event-driven system — at any scale
• Side projects or open-source work that shows you build because you can't not build