Responsibilities
- Expand DevDawg and Spice, which include cloud development environments and automated review and root-cause tooling.
- Build the paved roads for our API layer, covering REST blueprints, GraphQL schema, OpenAPI, realtime features, and authentication and permission plumbing.
- Modernize the backend framework layer, transitioning from Flask to FastAPI among other updates.
- Own how we see production, including observability, metrics, alerting, and readiness bar.
- Ship shared backend services and primitives, such as eventing patterns, database-change safety, delegated access, and an internal admin framework.
- Set the guardrails for coding agents in our backend, including static analysis, linting, hooks, and test harnesses.
- Partner across the organization: Infrastructure owns the substrate, and you own the application layer on top.
Benefits
- Competitive pay plus an organization-wide goal-based bonus.
- Approximately 5 weeks of PTO to start.
- 1-week all-company Winter Holiday Break.
- Paid US holidays.
- 2 extra days of PTO for every year you're with the company.
- 80% Work Option: work with your manager to choose between a standard 5-day week or a 4-day week at 80% pay.
- Paid leave for primary and secondary caregivers.
- 1-month paid sabbatical every 5 years with the team.
- Two medical plans with the company covering 99% of your premium, plus Dental, Vision, HSA, FSA, and company-paid Long-Term Disability.
- 401k: we match your contributions up to 6%, vested immediately.
Compensation
Competitive pay plus an organization-wide goal-based bonus.
Work Arrangement
Remote (Country) — USA
Team
Our backend tech stack consists primarily of Python Flask web apps with our TaskTiger scheduler handling many of the backend asynchronous task processing chores. Our data stores include MongoDB, PostgreSQL, Elasticsearch, and Redis. The underlying infrastructure runs on AWS using a combination of managed services like EKS, MSK, RDS and ElastiCache and non-managed services running on EC2 instances. We have CI/CD pipelines that build Docker images, run automated tests and deploy to Kubernetes clusters. We also use these images in our local development environment allowing coding locally against all of our services. We have a well-documented public API that is consumed by our front-end JavaScript app as well as numerous integrations. Our infrastructure is heavily automated using Terraform, Ansible and other AWS tools. We love open sourcing our code and ideas on our GitHub and on The Making of Close, our behind-the-scenes Product & Engineering blog. Check out our open source projects like SocketShark, TaskTiger, LimitLion and ciso8601. AI is both how we build and what we ship, and that's reshaped what engineering looks like. This is a transformation we’re embracing and find deeply exciting.
Our Values
- Build a house you want to live in - Examine long-term thinking and action.
- No BS - Practice transparency and honesty, especially when it’s hard.
- Invest in each other - Build successful relationships with your coworkers and customers.
- Discipline equals freedom - Keep your word to yourself and others.
- Strive for greatness - Constantly challenge yourself and others.
Our Hiring Process
We ask a few role-specific questions as part of our application process. These questions are designed to help us learn more about you from the start, so please answer each one thoughtfully. We see this as an opportunity to get to know you beyond your resume. We use AI tools daily at Close and expect candidates to do the same. In evaluating your application, we aim to get a sense for you - the way you think, how you communicate, the work you've done. Applications that read as fully AI-generated will not be considered. Regardless of fit, you can expect to hear back from our team with an update on the status of your candidacy. If you progress to the interview process, you'll receive a full outline of the role-specific steps in your first touchpoint with us. We do our best to make the hiring process clear and human.
Other
- USA Only, 100% Remote.
- We use AI tools daily at Close and expect candidates to do the same.
- Applications that read as fully AI-generated will not be considered.
- We do move people between teams as the work shifts.
