Senior Backend Engineer

📋 Description

• • Join Palette Labs Inc. as a Senior Backend Engineer and play a pivotal role in architecting and scaling our groundbreaking decentralized protocol for commerce. This is a unique opportunity to build foundational systems from the ground up in an early-stage startup environment, contributing directly to a vision that redefines how businesses and individuals interact in the digital marketplace.
• • As a Senior Backend Engineer, you will be instrumental in developing and ensuring the reliability of the core backend services that form the backbone of our protocol. Your responsibilities will span the entire lifecycle of these services, from initial design and development to deployment and ongoing production maintenance. You will be a key architect of well-structured web services, robust REST APIs, and essential data systems that power our diverse applications and facilitate seamless partner integrations.
• • We are seeking an individual with a proven history of building systems from scratch in fast-paced startup settings. The ideal candidate possesses a strong understanding of making pragmatic architectural decisions, even when faced with ambiguity and evolving requirements. While our current technology stack heavily features Rust, we value adaptability and encourage candidates comfortable working across multiple languages to embrace the opportunity to write production-ready Rust code.
• • You will collaborate closely with the founders and the product team, contributing significantly to the definition of our long-term backend architecture. This includes establishing and championing engineering best practices, setting high standards for code quality and maintainability, and laying the essential groundwork for future scalability. Your success will be measured by the quality, reliability, and extensibility of the services you deliver, as well as your ability to drive critical technical milestones within your first 6-12 months.
• • Key responsibilities include designing and building production-grade web services and REST APIs from first principles, ensuring they are robust, scalable, and efficient. You will architect clean, maintainable service boundaries, define clear data models, and establish effective internal interfaces that promote modularity and ease of understanding.
• • You will take full ownership of backend systems, managing them end-to-end. This encompasses everything from initial schema design and database optimization to seamless deployment and ensuring unwavering production reliability. A critical aspect of this role involves implementing best practices for transactional consistency, managing concurrency effectively, and building fault-tolerant systems that can withstand unexpected challenges.
• • Establishing comprehensive observability standards is paramount. This includes defining and implementing metrics, tracing, and logging strategies, setting clear Service Level Objectives (SLOs), and developing detailed operational playbooks to guide incident response and system maintenance.
• • You will lead technical execution across major initiatives, ensuring that the systems we build are not only functional but also highly extensible and prepared for significant future growth. This involves anticipating future needs and designing solutions that can adapt and scale.
• • A crucial part of your role will be partnering closely with the product team to translate often ambiguous requirements into elegant and clean backend abstractions. This requires strong communication skills and the ability to understand business needs and translate them into technical solutions.
• • Furthermore, you will be responsible for raising the overall bar on engineering rigor within the team. This includes championing robust testing strategies, promoting a culture of long-term maintainability, and ensuring that our codebase remains clean, well-documented, and easy to work with for future development.
• • This role offers a unique chance to shape the technical direction of a company at the forefront of decentralized commerce, working with cutting-edge technology and solving complex, real-world problems. If you are a seasoned backend engineer with a passion for building scalable, reliable systems and thrive in dynamic startup environments, we encourage you to apply.