Senior Backend Engineer

Brick•San Francisco, CA

8h•$160,000 - $210,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Brick is transforming how people interact with technology—helping people minimize distractions, reclaim focus, and live more intentionally. Our physical device and companion app turn smartphones from sources of distraction into tools for presence and productivity. We’re on a mission to help people take back control of their time and attention so they can focus on what matters most—and we’re building a team of thoughtful, driven people to make that happen. Brick is building an elegant solution to digital distraction through a combination of software and hardware that helps people stay focused, reclaim time, and do more of what matters. With the Brick app and companion device, users can block distracting apps and notifications to better align their time with intention. We are scaling rapidly and are building out a robust cloud platform that supports mobile clients, hardware devices, analytics, personalization, and real-time features. As a Senior/Staff Backend Engineer, you will own all work in the backend application architecture, feature development, system design, and user experience. You will work across NestJS, Postgres, secure data flows including DBT, and performance-sensitive functionality that interacts directly with our client side mobile applications. This is a senior, lead, high-impact role where you will help shape the future of Brick’s Backend product, and be one of the primary leads in the engineering organization. You will guide architectural decisions, establish best practices, and collaborate closely with product, design, iOS/Android, and hardware teams to deliver a polished, world-class product used every day.

Requirements

5+ years of professional backend engineering experience, with depth in TypeScript and a track record of owning services in production, not just contributing to them.
Strong relational data modeling and query performance skills in PostgreSQL Schema design, indexing strategy, reading query plans, and executing safe migrations against live, high-volume tables without taking locks that page the on-call.
Experience designing APIs consumed by long-lived mobile clients, including versioning and backward-compatibility discipline. You understand that you cannot force-update an installed base, and you design contracts accordingly.
Fluency with correctness patterns for unreliable clients, including idempotency, retry and replay semantics, conflict resolution, and sync protocols for devices that go offline and come back with stale writes.
Hands-on AWS experience with infrastructure as code (Terraform or CDK), least-privilege IAM, containerized or serverless compute, and production observability: structured logging, metrics, tracing, and meaningful SLOs.
Solid security and privacy instincts. Brick's data is intimate behavioral data about how people spend their attention. You should have real experience handling PII, managing secrets and key rotation, and reasoning about encryption in transit and at rest.
Excellent communication skills and the ability to work collaboratively across mobile, product, hardware, and data.

Nice To Haves

Experience with real-time delivery paths. WebSockets, fanout, and push notification pipelines (APNs, FCM, or a provider layer like OneSignal), including reasoning about delivery guarantees and dedupe.
Experience building event and analytics ingestion pipelines, including tracking-plan or schema governance and the tradeoffs between batch and streaming.
Familiarity with analytics engineering and transformation tooling (dbt or equivalent), and comfort reasoning about where transformation logic belongs across the operational and analytical boundary.
Familiarity with time-zone and recurring-schedule correctness: local-time semantics, DST transitions, and user-visible schedule boundaries.
Experience with feature flagging and experimentation infrastructure.
Strong experience leveraging AI (Claude Code, Codex, etc.) in backend developer workflows.
Ability to operate autonomously, navigate ambiguity, and drive high-quality outcomes in a fast-paced startup environment.

Responsibilities

Lead development of core features using TypeScript and modern backend frameworks.
Architect clean, testable, maintainable code with strong attention to reliability and performance.
Drive major initiatives across app blocking logic, analytics instrumentation, account and device sharing/management, and other core features.
Improve database performance, query behavior, logging, scalability and state management.
Implement robust communication layers with mobile clients, design and build with an offline first architecture.
Manage our infrastructure stack on AWS, and structured logging/tooling with DataDog.
Work with our data team to get user data into the analytics pipeline for company wide ingestion.
Lead test strategy, including unit testing, integration testing, snapshot testing, and CI reliability.
Improve developer experience through tooling, modularization, and architecture patterns.
Contribute to code review, documentation, and consistent engineering standards.
Partner with product and design to define user experiences that are intuitive, purposeful, and delightful.
Work closely with mobile engineers to shape API contracts, sync protocols, and real-time features.
Collaborate with hardware teams to deliver seamless mobile-to-device interactions.
Own the long-term technical vision and roadmap of the backend team.
Influence the product strategy lifecycle for our >1m mobile users.
Drive technical discovery, prototyping, and execution of complex product initiatives, including new hardware.