Senior Backend Engineer (Innovate)

📋 Description

• • Are you a seasoned backend engineer with a passion for innovation and a knack for navigating the exciting, yet challenging, world of high-risk product experimentation? Yubo, the leading Social Discovery app dedicated to fostering genuine connections for Gen Z, is seeking a Senior Backend Engineer to join our dynamic Backend Experience team and spearhead our brand-new Innovate squad.
• • This is a unique opportunity to be at the forefront of Yubo's future, contributing to our ambitious 2026 Tech organization. The Innovate squad is chartered with making bold product bets, testing ambitious features, and validating them through continuous, rapid experimentation. As a key member of this multi-disciplinary team, you will collaborate closely with Product, Mobile, Design, and Data specialists, working alongside another Senior Backend Engineer who co-leads the squad. Your primary focus will be on designing, shipping, and operating high-risk backend experiments that validate these audacious product visions, all while ensuring our systems remain resilient, scalable, and cost-efficient within a fast-paced iteration cycle.
• • This role is distinctly different from a traditional maintenance position. It's a hands-on, iterative journey of building, testing, deploying, rolling back, and learning at an accelerated pace. You will be instrumental in driving Yubo's growth by exploring uncharted territories and validating new product directions.
• • **Experiments & Product Bets:**
• • You will take ownership of the entire lifecycle of backend capabilities for experimental features, from initial specification and design through to production rollout and, if necessary, swift rollback. This involves translating product hypotheses into robust technical solutions.
• • A critical aspect of your role will be defining and instrumenting key success metrics in close collaboration with your cross-functional partners. This ensures that every experiment is measurable and provides actionable insights.
• • You will be expected to iterate rapidly based on experiment results, leveraging KPIs, dashboards, and quantitative signals to inform product and technical decisions. This agile approach is central to the squad's mission.
• • **Architecture & Operability:**
• • You will be responsible for building backend systems that are not only resilient and scalable but also cost-efficient, specifically architected to handle the demands of high-risk experimentation. This requires a deep understanding of trade-offs and robust design principles.
• • You will be the go-to person for diagnosing and resolving complex production issues, utilizing logs, metrics, and advanced observability tools to pinpoint and fix problems efficiently.
• • A proactive approach to operational impact is essential. You will need to anticipate and plan for deployment strategies, rollback procedures, comprehensive monitoring, and cost implications of your experiments.
• • **Standards & Knowledge Sharing:**
• • You will play a vital role in strengthening team-level best practices and developing reusable patterns that can be leveraged across multiple experiments and squads, fostering consistency and efficiency.
• • Contributing to essential documentation, Request for Comments (RFCs), and enhancing the internal usability of systems owned by the squad will be a key responsibility, ensuring knowledge transfer and maintainability.
• • While not mandatory, there is a significant opportunity to mentor your peers through constructive code reviews and collaborative pairing sessions, contributing to the overall growth and skill development of the engineering team.
• • **Technical Environment:**
• • Our backend is primarily built using Node.js and TypeScript, offering a modern and efficient development experience.
• • We embrace event-driven architectures, utilizing technologies like Kafka, RabbitMQ, and NATS to build decoupled and scalable systems.
• • Your experience will span various database technologies, including NoSQL, key-value stores, and relational databases, allowing you to choose the best tool for each specific need.
• • For observability, we rely on powerful tools such as Datadog and Grafana to monitor system health and performance.
• • Our development practices emphasize structured decision-making through RFC processes, detailed technical specifications, and a commitment to code quality and resilience.
• • Joining Yubo means becoming part of an international, multicultural team deeply committed to our mission of redefining social interactions. We place paramount importance on building a safe digital space for our community, with safety embedded in our DNA. You will contribute to this mission by ensuring the reliability and security of the experimental features you develop.
• • This is your chance to make a significant impact, drive innovation, and shape the future of social discovery. If you thrive in a fast-paced, experimental environment and are eager to build groundbreaking features, we encourage you to apply.