Senior/Staff Backend Engineer
About The Position
As part of Playground's engineering team, you will be responsible for designing, building, and scaling the core backend systems that power our platform. You’ll play a critical role in shaping the future of child care, working on infrastructure and services relied on by thousands of child care businesses, agencies, and government organizations. This role is focused on mission-critical backend systems. The APIs, services, and infrastructure that everything else depends on. You’ll lead projects from zero-to-one and evolve existing systems to handle increasing scale, complexity, security, and performance demands. We’re looking for self-starters who thrive on ownership, operate with urgency, and are excited to use modern AI coding tools to dramatically increase their leverage and output.
Requirements
- 5+ years of experience in backend software development.
- Strong proficiency in Node.js and Express (or similar backend frameworks).
- Experience designing and maintaining RESTful APIs in production environments.
- Strong experience operating systems in the cloud (GCP preferred), including infrastructure, performance tuning, and reliability best practices.
- Demonstrated ownership of high-impact, complex projects with minimal oversight.
- Clear, direct communicator who thrives in a fast-moving, high-accountability environment.
Responsibilities
- Lead the design and delivery of mission-critical backend systems using Node.js and Express, owning projects end-to-end from architecture through production reliability.
- Build and scale core platform services and APIs on GCP that power hundreds of thousands of users, with a focus on performance, security, and long-term maintainability.
- Establish strong observability practices (monitoring, logging, alerting via tools like Google Cloud Monitoring, Datadog etc) and drive improvements to system reliability and engineering velocity.
- Proactively identify technical debt and drive improvements to backend architecture.
Benefits
- Competitive salary + equity
- 3 weeks of PTO
- Health, vision, and dental benefits
- $1200/year education stipend
- Free lunch daily
- New MacBook
- Collaborative and supportive work culture with a high level of autonomy and room for growth
- Help accelerate our mission to make excellent child care accessible to all!
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Mid Level
Education Level
No Education Listed
